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IBM

IBMs 73Gig Drive 128

Posted by CmdrTaco from the 2000-thousand-albums-please dept.
goon wrote in to point us to this bit at news.com about the new UltraStar 72ZX which has a 4.9ms seek time, is an inch thick, and can store a comfortable 73 gigs. Its supposed to be available in 2000, and will make porn webmasters and MP3 addicts alike very happy.
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IBMs 73Gig Drive More

IBMs 73Gig Drive

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  • I'm afraid that the next drive for my mp3 player may need to be one of these.
    Since getting into mp3s, I've evolved from a 2G, to a 2G + 6G, 6G + 13G and that's now full!
    73G would keep me out of trouble for another year.

    Cheers,
    GRH
  • Actually, this seems to be a good time to ask.

    Can you actually install Linux on those huge harddrives? My understanding was that Linux (on Intel systems) was limited to 8 Gb, but this seems wrong since I've read about people who had 9Gb drives and running Linux.

    Note, I'm not talking about the boot partition (which has to be inside the first 2 Gb), but rather whether Linux can "see" past 8 Gb. Anyone know before I plunk down money for a 20 Gb harrdrive?

    Thanks...
  • Amen brother! Why use lossy compression with that kind of space. Simply digitize the sample raw and, at most, bzip2 it ... absolute clarity. Resample as mp3 for the car unit as required ...
  • My system can only handle 8.4G. :(

    But when I buy a new computer I will like one of these!!

    Just a note, with a 70+G drives, thats a lot of data to loose if one were to crash. What is the best media to use to back these suckers up?

    Steven Rostedt
  • You'd be nice to all of us and write a modified MP3 compressor for somewhere around 168 or 256 Kbps with focus on full range of sound quality ... less data loss, especially in classical, etc. music. With that kind of space you'd want to store every CD you own in MP3, not just store the MP3's you've got bigger ... :)
  • 69 gigabytes? I can definetly see why the marketing people might want to change it :)
  • Just this morning I as supposed to 'upgrade' my computer to Office 2000, etc.

    The upgrade program told me I didn't have enough room on my C: drive, and aborted. I have 180MB free - what do they want?

    I guess I need one of these IBM drives...
  • Yeah, but, come on, man!!! You can have about 7 and a half WEEKS worth of music on that drive! acckkk drool ugg heart attack

    And imagine if you put four of these in a RAID... music for a lifetime. wow.

    :/

    MP3: not just an addiction -- a way of life
  • So... how long before we get terrabyte storage for under $300? I don't think magnetic media will ba able to store this much so what is the next tech that will be able to do that? Holographic memory?

  • Wow! (Score:5)

    by eriko ( 35554 ) on Friday October 15, 1999 @03:42AM (#1611795) Homepage
    You could get Windows 2000 AND Office 2000 on the SAME drive!
  • The only mention of size of the 36G version, and it's not clear:

    Arriving this year, though, will be new 36GB drives. The drives are based on the same innards as the 73GB model, but will be only 1 inch thick. Current 36GB drives aren't as thin.

    It's not clear whether the double capacity version is also 1 inch thick.

    --

  • forget MP3, with 73GB i'd keep my audio in 44KHz AIFF files!
  • Like, WOW.

    Any price point information anybody? I could do with one of these, but I have a feeling that I'd need to go SCSI to take advantage of it.

    Anybody have any more technical specs?

    Then again, I doubt I could sleep in a house with this damn thing. Probably sounds like a jet taking off!
  • I didn't see a cost mentioned... wonder what its gonna cost? The fact that it is an inch thick is mind boggling... but the biggest ever? Wasn't there a three terabyte refrigerator hard drive?

  • The 36G Version [ibm.com] has specs listed on IBM's web site already, but no mention of the 73G drive.

    It would be sort of nice to not have to do a "make distclean" ever again ;-)

  • Storage Observations (Score:3)

    by Effugas ( 2378 ) on Friday October 15, 1999 @03:48AM (#1611801) Homepage
    I'd say we're about three weeks away from conspiracy theorists deciding that Magnetoresistative technology was Alien Derived.

    IBM is pretty much owning price/performance and raw storage curves--it's insane how fast storage expectancies have dropped. $10/GB is the magic number now, and I'm pretty sure we have IBM to thank for that.

    64MB of RAM now costs more than a 12GB IDE drive. The mind boggles.

    I believe this is the same technology jump, incidentally, that means 2GB on a one inch Microdrive platter. Personally, I'd prefer a third party reverse engineering of MiniDisc, but a 2GB swappable drive would also work fine.

    I must say, I'm enjoying the storage (r?)evolution. The media server we're building into our stereo cabinet will store more music than we'll know what to do with...;-) And yes, the code will be nice and GPL.

    Here's to mindless abuse of technology...

    Yours Truly,

    Dan Kaminsky
    DoxPara Research
    http://www.doxpara.com
  • I ran into that problem myself, when I bought a new 13GB disk for my Linux server awhile ago. I solved it by changing the disk geometry settings in fdisk (under "advanced", IIRC). Apparently it's now handled using 1644/255/63 as C/H/S -- I forgot what I changed it to, but that's from the kernel boot message. Works fine.
  • I now use 9.1Gb hitachi 91WS UWSCSI drives and they've proven to be quite reliable, however I've always been sceptical about bigger size hard drives (wasn't 4.3 the reliable threshold last year?).

    No pr0ns and no mp3s for me, just a lot of CT scans and them again processed one way, and another way, and yet another way.... that's a lot of space!

    I'm not that scared about the server crashing 'coz I keep my results up to date on DLT (this is a research server I'm talking about, not an actual hospital database server), but if I were to upgrade to bigger disks, I'd be skeptical about their reliability, and 73Gb sounds far too much to be 110% reliable...
    I know I'm too paranoid to be running free, but I'd still be interested about what you people think... what do you think the reliability threshold is these days?

    ---

  • Wow, and my refrigerator doesn't even _have_ a hard drive...
  • leave more room for Windows, and mount its partition under Linux. Dunno if Solaris can read Win filesystems.

    I've always had best luck with 1OS/1drive myself.
  • Actually, the 2 GB maximum partition size limit only existed with FAT16. All Windows9x versions since Win95 OSR2 can handle FAT32, which copes significantly more (don't remember the exact number).

  • Personally, I'd prefer a third party reverse engineering of MiniDisc

    You mean sony's optical audio medium? I think it's not worth the bother. 74 minutes at 5:1 compression means it doesn't hold a lot more than a zip disk. (~160 MB?) They do, however, have a kind of anime-cyber-cool to them which zip disks lack. I'm not sure how fast they CAN be, since for standard audio applications they only NEED to deliver 30 KB/s.

    All that aside, a MD based portable MP3 player would be nice.

  • You've not looked quite far enough. There's an explanation of the problem further through the same document:

    12.1 IDE problems with 34+ GB disks

    Drives larger than 33.8 GB will not work with recent kernels. The details are as follows. Suppose you bought a new IBM-DPTA-373420 disk with a capacity of 66835440 sectors (34.2 GB). Recent kernels will tell you that the size is 769*16*63 = 775152 sectors (0.4 GB), which is a bit disappointing. And giving command line parameters hdc=4160,255,63 doesn't help at all - these are just ignored. What happens? The routine idedisk_setup() retrieves the geometry reported by the disk (which is 16383/16/63) and overwrites what the user specified on the command line, so that the user data is used only for the BIOS geometry.

    The routine current_capacity() or idedisk_capacity() recomputes the cylinder number as 66835440/(16*63)=66305, but since this is stored in a short, it becomes 769. Since lba_capacity_is_ok() destroyed id->cyls, every following call to it will return false, so that the disk capacity becomes 769*16*63. A patch is available - probably it will soon get into some official kernel.

    I can vouch for this first hand, since I've got one of the IBM 37GB drives. Andreas' patch certainly seems to fix the problem. But it'll be nice when it does officially get to be part of the kernel.
    --
    Too stupid to live.

  • And don't think formatting comes for free either!
  • I'd say yes you can. I have two 8.4GB drives and one 20GB drive mounted on my Linux 2.2.12 system. No problems at all, standard fdisk, mke2fs and mount managed it without any extra settings, and it works perfectly fine.

    The only sad part is the time... mke2fs did take a while... ;) And I fear the time when I have to "test" the fsck times... =/

  • Another 70 Gb drive. Otherwise you're going to be changing DATs all night...
  • ...as a hard drive? $150 gets you a 15 gig, a zip disk .1gig costs $10???
  • That's why the article mentions that the drive is late, and was supposed to be shipping now instead of 2000. IBM is still behind Seagate in the high end, a (small) source of embarassment to IBM.

  • Re:73GB? (Score:3)

    by Delphis ( 11548 ) on Friday October 15, 1999 @05:33AM (#1611816) Homepage
    Heh.. 69GB ? .. this thing really IS a drive for porn ... :>

  • (I'm assuming this was 1989/90 or so?)

    Size:
    MS-Word 4.0 for DOS was 4 megs.
    Wasteland (the game) ran off a single 720k floppy.
    DOS itself was less than 3 megs.
    The 5.25" floppy was not only still in production, but you usually got software on BOTH sized disks!
    The 28.8 modem had JUST come out.

    I had an long term, ongoing project when I was an undergrad. Had to document readings off of a server every week regarding logins. It was in WordPerfect.

    In 5.1, it was 168k.
    In WordPefect 6.0 for win, it was 821k.
    In WordPefect 8.0 for win, it was 5 megs.

    I doubt I added more than a half a dozen pages between version upgrades...

    ...so size is relative.
  • Protien chains storing data? In quantum computing movement?
  • Definitely ... Windows is FAR more innefficient for storage that Linux so it eats up all it's share while Linux still has masses free. Best to give Windows more space for game installs as well .. as they can be insane.

    Well, my Linux partitions were fairly free until I started turning CDs into MP3s ....

  • But it would be really groovy to make this big FAT16 partions as well if it was possible..

    FAT16 allows 16 bits cluster adressing, meaning that you get 2^16. Divide 73GB with that and you get 1.06 MB per cluster... really efficient on your disk space!
  • Actually, Windows drives have the following characteristics (you can see that when you mount them): rw, noexec, nosuid, nodev. That means that it's stupid to put stuff other than MP3's on them - it's an "all or nothing" access mode, sort of like mounting FAT16 from Windows NT.
  • Win95 has an arbitrary 2gig FAT 16 limit. One can create a 4 gig FAT 16 partition with NT. Of course, that only makes sense if you are going to convert it to NTFS because of cluster considerations. matt
  • Actually, I had a couple people tell me RAM prices were on their way up a few days BEFORE the earthquake.

    The earthquake increased the effect, but prices were already on their way up. I've seen this repeatedly -- something happens some place that has something to do with semiconductor production, and RAM prices shoot up before the pipeline has a chance to go dry, and hang there as long as possible. That's the way a market economy works. You charge what you can get.

    Observation (getting further off topic): We always seem to need to add $100-$150 worth of RAM to our computers:
    Back when 48K was common, we paid $150 or so to up it to 64k.
    When 64k was common, we paid $120 or so to up it to 128k.
    ... (I'll spare you the rest of this progression)
    Now, we want to add another 128M to our systems, but I'll wait until the price drops back down to $150... 8)

    Hard disk prices just seem to drop.

    Nick.
  • Reliability, all other things being equal, should be BETTER with one honking large drive rather than multiple smaller drives (my reasoning: MTBF/number of drives).

    Don't forget, you're getting a ton of additional speed out of these puppies, also, presuming the rotational speed is the same.

    No, what I'd be worried about is backup, even with a DLT stacker. So we can cram 70GB on a DLT, on a good day. That sure doesn't seem like as much as it used to. Some corresponding revolution is going to have to happen with backup technology - I hope...

  • Robotic Library. Cost: $2500 (for an Exabyte 10H, 140GB compressed) and up
  • Well even if you like watching movies 5 minutes at a time, it would take hours to delete all 24 2 gig files such a movie would take.
  • Has anyone actualy worked with large FAT32 partisions. I would think that as a FAT32 approaches 100 Gig or so, it would become such a mess. What do you peaple that have FAT partisions on those 20+ gig drives see. Is it slugish. I quit using FAT partisions when a 3.2 Gig drive was average. Currently I use Ext2 on a 9 Gig disk.
  • so we come up with a hack that would let you distribute MP3 or MPEG or whatever with a data file that tells the playing software to to play this file and then in five minutes use this file... it should let you delete them all as one as well. and did the minimum system requirements jump on me again, I'm using a 10G hard drive and it's HUGE compared to the 165M hard drive on my 486...

    Did you mean 'hacker' or 'cracker'?
    Do you know the diffrence? I don't think you do.

  • Sounds like it will make a nice server drive. I know, SCSI is preferred for servers, but a 4.5ms ~70Gb drive is nothing to sneeze at; just think how much cheaper two of these puppies with a PCI RAID-0 controller would be than some nice UW SCSI drives with a raid controller...
  • O.k., 73G (or more accurately, a lot less!) on one drive is cool, but what about backup?

    Virtually all backup devices are measured using "compressed" capacity, which is bogus, at best. Fraud might be a better word. Usually, on a big drive, you have either huge databases (which typically compress well) or lots of graphics and sound files, which compress hardly at all. Selling a drive based on its compressed capacity is kinda like measuring the interior space of a car by including the roof rack and the potential trailer you could tow.

    I'm a little concerned that backup technology isn't really keeping up with HD technology. I'm even more concerned that hardly anyone pays attention to backup technology around here -- I only saw one person ask how you would back the thing up, and the one reply was to another drive. Having one on-line backup is NOT a backup strategy!

    It scares the heck out of me to see people buying 10+G drives without a thought to backup. Even if it is all programs, trying to rebuild a system after a data loss is very, very time consuming.

    I'm also a little ticked off over the quality of backup devices. I've replaced far more tape drives in my client's servers than I have hard disks. Really pathetic. A friend has assured me DLTs are much better than the DATs I normally recommend, and that may be true, but $3000 for a drive and $100 per media, well, that's a few DAT drives. I gave up on Travan drives on servers -- I've had astronomical failure rates on both drives and tapes, but curiously, they seem to do o.k. on Windows 9x workstations.

    Nick.

  • Some enterprising company *really* needs to get around to exercising the MiniDisc format.

    I want this puppy to plug into a 3.5" bay on my computer as a backup media and as an audio recording media (using Sony's compression or MP3 compression, my choice); I want it to plug into an automobile audio bay to play back my music; I want to use it as a portable walkman-style playback unit; and I want to be able to use it as a backup media through the parallel port on computers that don't have the bay interface.

    The car interface doesn't need an amplifier et al; I'll supply my own. It just needs to be a convienent way of plugging in the deck to the system.

    The computer bay interface should be high speed, and function just like a normal hard drive (making it compatible with all OSes, I hope).

    The parallel port interface should be compatible with Zip's parallel port. Makes it more likely that the target computer already has the necessary software installed.

    All in all, it'd be damn sweet. :)
  • I just did that in System Shock 2. The adventure was neat, but the running out of ammo and stuff sucked, so I used UltraEdit (Great program) and gave myself 32K nanites and 32K modules. It might have worked with higher numbers, but I didn't need any more...

    And the game was great. Go up to a dispenser and get 100+ clips, auto-repair tools, etc.

    Then it was just a matter of running around and doing stuff.


    BTW, was I the only one who couldn't find all the display panels for the uplink code?

    I had three numbers, for four digits, out of five. I didn't know the order, but the 6 had a ] next to it hinting it was at the end. So I tried all the combinations and hit it fairly quickly. Luckily the program didn't start auto-failing all password attempts after three failures in five minutes. :)

    Cool game. Too bad you couldn't actually interact with anybody. And you didn't meet any NPCs, just heard messages. And, like most games, you're the only one to survive. Too bad some of the 'cool' people who left the neat messages didn't make it.

    But, definately playable. The only drawbacks were the engine (yuck) and the clumsy hand-to-hand weapons.
  • The correct answer to this question is obvious: none. You should never trust a drive of any size if you are in a mission-critical situation.

    Get five of 'em, put 4 in your machine with RAID-5, and keep one on the shelf. WHEN (not if) one of the drives fails, swap it out with the spare. You can be back up and running in a matter of minutes. Most hard drive companies that I've dealt with are more than happy to replace that defective drive for free, but it takes a few weeks of turnaround time.

    BTW: RAID-5 is not an alternative to backups!

    -TomK

    (drool.. 69*3 = 207 gigs..)
  • I got the IBM UltraStar 9zx back when it was a pre-release.. The one problem was that it got way to hot, but it was IBM's first 10k rpm drive, and Seagate was definately in the lead in solving minor problems like that (they had worked the kinks out then, as they had unleashed their 2nd generation). The drive did die, sadly, but not horribly. It died because I was to slow finding a solution for heat, and even though I had, months later it gave up. It tried, failing to spin up. It was still in good enough shape that I saved all the data I needed... which is the good thing about networks/2nd hard drives.

    IBM's tech support didn't even care about hearing my problem.. they just said, sure, well send you a new drive, it will be there in 3-7 days, and you have 2-3 weeks to get the defective drive to us. That was it... an having two 9gb UltraWide SCSI 10k rpm drives.. when both working.. you feel a bit bad about sending one back. :) Course, now with the 72/34 gbs.... (BTW.. people never noticed its Ultra3 / Fibre only. Hard to find a cheap (~$200) scsi card for that...)
  • The data sheet for this is now available at IBM's web site http://www.storage.ibm.com/hardsoft/diskdrdl/ultra /72zxdata.htm [ibm.com].
  • ...on *32-bit systems*, courtesy of things like the size of an offset or file length. Even 'tho ext2 itself (design-wise) can handle larger files, the programming interface doesn't.
  • Anyone notice that this is a Fibre Channel drive? I doubt even the hardest core MP3 junkies will be adding a FC controller to their systems.

    Better of with a pair of 50GB LVD drives, more space and less $$ (when you take the conrtoller into account)

    -Pete
  • Quite apart from the problem of finding a backup device with enough capacity, it's going to take longer and longer to just copy all the data off these ever bigger devices.

    The capacity goes up because the recording density increases. This increases the transfer rate too, but only by the square root of the capacity increase (because reading speed depends on the linear, rather than area, density).

    So unless spin speeds increase further (which is a problem because of heat), a disk of double the capacity takes 41% longer to copy.

  • Re:A lot of music... (Score:3)

    by jonathanclark ( 29656 ) on Friday October 15, 1999 @07:18AM (#1611847) Homepage
    CDDB the online CD database claims
    "still the world's largest CD database with over 390,000 titles and 4,500,000 audio tracks".

    Estimate an audio track to be on average 3MB, and you are looking at 12 terabytes
    of music right there. From my experiences CDDB has pretty good coverage of english
    music, but it's lacking some foreign titles. So add 10-20% more to the estimate. They are
    currently working on a version with international character sets, so it might be a lot higher
    if they don't have any Asain titles. Also you add maybe another few TBs for new
    bands and old bands that are not available in CD form.

    I wonder how many years it will be before 16TB is easily affordable? Less than 10 if moore's
    law holds for storage. hmm.. it would take you ~64 years to listen to it all though. course
    there is very little of that which you actually *want* to listen to. that's where group filtering comes in.

    Anyhow, my prediction is that within 10 years an ordinary person will have a complete collection of the world's published music in their home. Legal issues aside, I think this is pretty exciting.
  • Does anyone know the max partition size in windows 95 and 98? I'm pretty sure that solaris is in the terabyte range.
  • 73Gigs wimpy they have already developed a 2300 Gig HD
    that's some serious space for MP3s.
  • Actually 73Gig is nothing. I could fill up a 73Gig drive in no time. I think the way to go is with Ferroelectric Molecular Optical Storage Nanotechnology. Colossal Storage has invented new ways of non - contact reading and writing with non destructive reading of information to a ferroelectric molecule, which not only results in a far larger capacity (4 gigabits/sq.in. maxing at 40 gigabits compared with 40 gigabits/sq.in up to 500 gigabits/sq.in), but also the speed is fantastic; The FE Drive will have much higher disk spindle speeds over 10,000 rpm and higher bandwidth data transfer rate parameters over 500 mbps. What all this means, is that someday we will get away from our present magnetic HD's and break way beyond the 1Terrabyte! And we are not talking 10years down the road! The technology is here today, and wil be available to mass consumers by 2002. Click here for more stuff about ferroelectricity [nasa.gov]
  • True, they have built a 2300 GB drive, however it is only in the development stages (thought they did have a working model earlier this year). I do agree that in a few years 73 GBs will seem like 64k does today, but, in the meantime, 73 GB will have to do.

    Anyway, how big is your hard drive now? 6.4, 10.8? Somewhere around there? Anyway, if 73 GB is wimpy, then 6.4 is a trivial amount. Besides, how many mp3's can you have (a friend of mine's friend of his who goes to Ga. Tech has over 41 CD's of mp3's (26.2 GB worth, and he had more to burn)).

    In the meantime, use RAID and some 20 GB drives. You can make a 100 GB drive out of that (and....mount filesystems over a network to get tetrabytes of data on a single filesystem!!!).

    That's my $(2^4*3+1/7%3*2/100)
  • Just get two and do nightly backups to a friend's house. I don't see what the big deal is, though,
    you can get 37 gig ide drives today for a lot less.
  • At least on my system Windows 98 seems really confused by the 27GB Maxtor I have. I made an Ext2, Fat32 and Fat32 logical drive on the extended partition. Win98 SE Fdisk reports it as being something like 20MB, and when I tried to partition it, it made the extended partition on top of another one. (The sectors overlapped). I tried setting the paritions up under linux but it misreads the size of it.

  • I vaguely remember it being recommended that windows and other OSes be kept on separate hard drives so that there could be no confusion about it. This is prolly just an example of why that is :)
  • those TB size "drives" arent drives at all. They are refrigerator-sized drives. You could warm a friggin room on the exaust on one of those! I would really like a 1TB 3.5" HD though.
  • Actually, I had a couple people tell me RAM prices were on their way up a few days BEFORE the earthquake.

    yeah, that's for damn sure... I'm piecing a box together for a friend and made the mistake of holding off on ordering the RAM over the prior weekend.... I'm kicking my self right now.
  • With a drive that big, we'll soon go back to the old days of "backing up data, insert CD-ROM 1 of 100..."

    However for most home users, a CD or two should be enough to backup the system, and one can always download those pirated mp3s again, and again...

  • Fibre Channel is one option... the data sheet [ibm.com] for the 72ZX also lists two impls of Ultra3 SCSI - Ultra160 and Ultra160+.

    The fact that some marketing schmuck listed FC instead of SCSI on the PR shouldn't surprise anyone... these are the same idiots who use 10^3x instead of 2^10x for their capacity measurements.

    Oh, and the height for those that wondered is 41.6 mm. (~2 in).
  • You could get Windows 2000 AND Office 2000 on the SAME drive! only 'till the first service pack comes around.
  • That is in large part due to the fact that IBM
    has been porring massive money into figuring out
    how to build these things. IBM has a lot of really cool R&D stuff going on around. (And have gotten a few Nobel prizes over the years for it)
  • The "refrigerator hard drive" mentioned consists of many spindles in one case. Calling that a hard drive is a stretch.

    Benny
  • Pricewatch.com has the IBM ultrastar 36xp 36gb u2wscsi fcal 7200rpm hd * order online and use promo code: 704P, qty 1/order * ibm hard drives, part 08l8411 $ 1056

    That's $29/G :-)

  • I pay a lot more for a smaller , super-reliable than I would for a huge drive that clacks and sputters in a couple of years.
    I am deciding what kind of auxillary hard drive to get and I am not so sure about this 20GB drive i found for $220 ... but um, i guess that looks pretty small next to this one.

  • Digital VCR from week -> month (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    A number of digital appliances are limited to two disk boxes for practical reasons. For example personal digital VCRS currently top out at 28 gigs- 25 hours of viewing- or about a week of offline viewing for a typical viewer. The new disks will gradruple this capacity to a month.
  • 'And I fear the time when I have to "test" the fsck times...'

    I betcha that at least one of the journaling file systems for Linux will be available by the time this drive is on shelves -- my understanding is that ext3 is almost ready for beta testing and that XFS will be done soon.

    It won't eliminate fscking but it should alleviate a lot of it.
  • Will this hard drive exceed the limit of LBA? I still can't believe that they haven't just created a BIOS efficent enough to hold enough cylinders, heads and sectors for the new drives.

    Needless to say, we're still putting a floppy controller on motherboards. Thank iomega for that. Hello? some industry standards here?
  • but then you need a AI serach engine for your PLAY LIST. "Hel, what was the playlist I heard the other day when I was eating a strewberry? No not before I went to the holloweed party, something like 'lalala -lala la'.... What you can't find it?!?"

    What's the different from that to a commercial free radio station. Ever wonder what people go to blockbuster which has the world's choises and pick up a copy of "Superstar"? Because people LIKE to eat up the ads. You can afford to have every phonebook from every city, but you don't need to.



    CY
  • apparently the format 73GB drive is
    'the size of a paperback', whatever the
    size of a paperback is.


  • Some enterprising company *really* needs to get around to exercising the MiniDisc format.

    I want this puppy to plug into a 3.5" bay on my computer as a backup media and as an audio recording
    media (using Sony's compression or MP3 compression, my choice); I want it to plug into an automobile
    audio bay to play back my music; I want to use it as a portable walkman-style playback unit; and I want to
    be able to use it as a backup media through the parallel port on computers that don't have the bay interface.

    The car interface doesn't need an amplifier et al; I'll supply my own. It just needs to be a convienent way of
    plugging in the deck to the system.

    The computer bay interface should be high speed, and function just like a normal hard drive (making it
    compatible with all OSes, I hope)....

    Don't forget breakfast in bed !!

    - Hajj
  • PriceWatch already lists the Maxtor 93652U8 36.5GB drive (9gig per platter, 4 platters).

    It's only $290

    Price Watch Search Maxtor 36.5 [pricewatch.com]

    Of course the most gig per buck is the Maxtor 27.2GB for $201. (I payed $260 a few weeks ago)

    The 27.2GB Maxtor transfers at over 18meg per second according to the Adaptec SCSIBench32 in EZ-SCSI 5.0 (which does test IDE as well as SCSI).

    Pretty impressive for a 5400RPM consumer level drive!


  • ahh... but these are easily surmounted problems :)

    first you don't buy just one of these babies... you buy several and put them together in a mirrored RAID array. After all, at a mere US$3000/each (wild guess based on cost of 36PL drives) these are "inexpensive discs". By having two RAIDs mirrored off each other you no longer need to do backups, and you can capitalize on paralellism for reads. Writes are another story... but with that much DASD farmed out you'll never have time to write anyting... you're going to be too busy looking for what you already have.


    (put your flame throwers away while I pull my tounge out of my cheek ;)
  • Using FAT16 you are limited to 4 gig, under FAT 32 I believe the upper limit is around 2 terabytes
    treke
  • I wonder how long it would take Windows users to run scandisk on a filled 73 GB hd?!
  • The most difficult problem would be to personally keeping it up-to-date. In comes an automatic update system (bandwidth, esp in the 256kbit range will be damn cheap and common too (how big does a broadcast channel need to be to be able to send out _all_ new music?)), but then why download music you're not going to listen to. So my guess is there will be repositories easy access, much like video on demand, but then audio (or video clips thrown in for free?), and then not on-demand, but automagically tailored to your own personal taste by smart selection, 'buddy'-systems, deejays, and whatnot. A whole new industry I'd say. 1000 million people in the richest countries, each of them their own personal radio channel.

    And still we'd have to listen to those ads that pay for it all...

    Everything will change, but then again it will all stay the same.

  • Just a question. But at what point is a hard disk to big? Or will we always find files to fill up any size drive with? If I get a 73gig hard dirve and fill it up with games, OS's, and neat stuff, then it will take me 116 650meg CD's to back up my system. While I'll agree that bigger is better in this instance. The down side is that Other storage form techolngy, like burnable DVD's or the like are not yet availbilty
  • You know, some people *DO* have to work in Windows... I think a 73gb drive would be required to even consider installing Win2k plus office 2k (standard). Until Win2k SP1, that is... M$ will fill up that drive with the service pack. "Unable to install Service Pack 1 for Windows 2000: Insufficient drive space. You have: 53 GB free. You need: 948 GB free to continue."

    I've found that hard drives tend to be the easiest (and fastest) way to backup hard drives. Buy two identical ones, hook em up, keep one unmounted until it's time to image. Only problem is keeping one offsite (but hey, it's unmounted...)
  • I wonder if this has anything to do with Micron getting the US government to increase import tariffs on DRAM.

  • The current partitioning scheme doesn't allow for more than 16 partitions, and with Windows, that's reduced to 13.

    (Up to 4 primary partitions, and you can have 4 extended partitions per primary partition, but Windows needs to be on a primary to boot...)

  • I'm not talking about connections, I'm talking about backup strategies.

    There are a few things I insist on with backups:
    * Rotation
    * Off-site (at least ability to do it)

    Rotation means you are not backing up twice in a row on the same media. Why? The most likely time for a drive to fail is DURRING the backup, it is the very time the most intensive disk activity takes place, and the only time the ENTIRE disk system is read. IF the drive fails durring the backup, you have 1) a dead drive and the need for a good backup and 2) just clobbered your only good backup.

    Further, the most common reason to go to the backup is NOT drive failure! It is user error (Oops...didn't mean to delete that!) or data corruption (program error). VERY OFTEN, the problem won't be found for days (weeks? MONTHS??). You *HAVE* to have some kind of history to go back to. I tell my barely trainable clients to use a one-week rotation (five media), the more sophisticated will often do a second rotation of weekly backups (for example, four Wednesday tapes), and the truly enlightened will pull a monthly tape for permanent archiving.

    Off-site: For serious use, some kind of off-site backup is important. Most people just toss their tapes on top their computer and walk away. In the event of fire, flood, theft, roof leak, whatever, very often the server is lost -- ALONG WITH THE BACKUPS! In many data-oriented businesses, they can set up in someone's basement, but they need their data. These people need some kind of off-site backup to rebuild their business in the event of a site-disaster.

    I would argue that an improper backup strategy is worse than no backups at all. If you aren't doing backups, you usually know you are doing something stupid and living on the edge. Doing improper backups causes people to think they are "mostly safe", and that "most" of their data will come back...but that is VERY rarely the case.

    By the way, RAID has nothing to do with backups. RAID will keep you running in the event of a drive failure. Doesn't do squat in the event of data corruption, accidental deletion, theft, fire, etc. It also doesn't help you if your system has a controller failure and you can't find a compatable RAID controller to restore your system to operation (people tend to forget that. They rarely have a spare controller in the closet). I yell at any of my clients who mention RAID and Backups in the same sentance.

    Part of me keeps having this thought that many of the people here are "hobbiest users", and perhaps this really doesn't apply. Reality keeps reminding me just how long it would take to just set up 60+G of data, assuming you actually have the original data someplace. If you are actually CREATING data, forget it. Hobbiest users need backups, too.

    I'm very tough on people using backups. I will and have dropped clients who don't do proper backups. I can afford to have anyone NOT as a client, I can't afford to have them as an unhappy client, and if they aren't doing their backups properly, they will be an unhappy client someday.

    Nick.
    The Backup Nazi.
  • IDE will reach its limits soon with the emergence of drives like these.

    From:

    Mueller, Scott. Upgrading and Repairing PC's (Sixth Edition), Que Corporation,
    Indianapolis In, 1996, pg.761.

    drive size limits are as follows:

    IDE Drive limits:
    The maximum theoretical ST-506/412, ESDI or IDE interface is:
    65,536 Cyls x 16 Hds x 256 Secs x 512 bytes = 137,438,943,472 Bytes (128GB)
    The limit with ATA-2 LBA (which is a 28 bit number) support for EIDE:
    268,435,456 LBAs (sectors) x 512 Bytes = 137,438,953,472 Bytes (128 GB)

    IDE BIOS limits:
    The limit with Standard PC BIOS:
    1,024 Cyls x 16 Hds x 63 Secs x 512 Bytes = 528,482,304 Bytes (504 MB)
    The limit with Enhanced PC BIOS:
    1,024 Cyls x 256 Hds x 63 Secs x 512 Bytes = 8,455,716,864 Bytes (7.875 GB)


    SCSI Drive limits:
    The limit for SCSI LBA (Logical Block Address), which is a 32 bit number:
    4,294,967,296 LBAs (sectors) x 512 bytes = 2,199,023,255,552 Bytes (2048 GB)

    SCSI BIOS limits:
    Adapters with Enhanced SCSI PC BIOS:
    1,024 Cyls x 256 Hds x 63 Secs x 512 Bytes = 8,455,716,864 Bytes (7.875 GB)

    Thankfully SCSI has an absolute max of 2 TB and we won't bee seeing that for a while (1 year) :)

    ( pi = 3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375 10582097494459 )
    ( Chris Katscher at spatch@primenet.com )
    ( e = 2.718281828459045235360287471352662497757247093699 95957496696762 )
    ( Web page: http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Byte/1427/i ndex.html )
    ( g = 0.577215664901532860606512090082402431042159335939 92359880576723 )
  • Quantum Computing makes solid-state. 1.6GB drives for about $43,000. With no moving parts, these drives should never wear out.
  • Actually only on 32 bit files systems. Don't have that problem with BeOS, ha ha!
  • That's Right, magnetic storage can't hold a tb of data. I think that they need to invent a new medium of storage....and fast. We're going to be out of storage soon. IBM, Maxtor, WD....HELP

  • 73GB? (Score:3)

    by tomk ( 20364 ) on Friday October 15, 1999 @04:00AM (#1611891)
    Don't forget, this drive is "only" 69.6 Gibibytes.

    Those funny marketing people.

    -TomK

  • Things change (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I remember my old 43MB Seagate ST-147A that had to be split in two partitions because DOS 3.30 couldn't handle partitions larger than 32MB. LOL!

  • Great (Score:1)

    by ToOn ( 56014 )
    And I need more real estate, since my mods/skins/levels outside of my regular on-line games takes up about 3 gigs alone...

    porn? Bah. MP3's? ok... yeah.

  • 64MB of RAM now costs more than a 12GB IDE drive.

    I have heard rumor that the devistation of the earthquake has been "repaired" (not saying it wasn't devistating as far as personal life/property), and that RAM manufactures were up to full speed already.

    The rumor further says that it's the markets willingness to pay over $2/M still that has kept the prices up for the last couple weeks, when not that long ago prices were well under $1/M.

    Anyone know of any proof of these "rumors"???

  • After all, it's only really 73 thousand megabytes. Use a proper numbering system! james
  • I've been looking at the hard drive industry and for the last two years I've been drooling at their hard drives all this time. First came the Deskstar 8... then the Deskstar 14... then the deskstar 22.... then the deskstar 34... and now the ultrastar 72. yes, we are all excited about these HUGE hard drives, but IBM has a tendency to announce them a long time before their release. And when they do release it, the OEMs such as DELL usually gets it first. Unless you got some inside connection with IBM or an OEM, I don't think you'll be able to get your hands on one of these babies for another six month.

    BTW, IBM tech support was kind enough to replace my dead 10 gig with a 14.4 GB :)



    _______________________________________________
    There is no statute of limitation on stupidity.
  • Tesa rom anyone? holographic storage on tesa adhesive tape... already sticky BEFORE use...
  • I want. Though it would be nice if IBM would announce a general price range.

    And to think those big honkin' 4.3g disks in the RAID at work cost only $1200 a pop five years ago.
  • I'm running out of hard drive space right now... this is sweet.
    Brian's Rule For Hard Drive Space Says:
    Actual hard drive space=Total hard drive space/Number of OS's.
    I have 5 GB total / 3 OS's (Linux, Windblows, Solaris) = 1.66 GB.
    Yuck.

  • A lot of music... (Score:3)

    by .pentai. ( 37595 ) on Friday October 15, 1999 @04:12AM (#1611904) Homepage
    Ok, for 256kbit mp3s, it's approx 2 megs per minute...that means 512 minutes per gig. So 512 minutes * 73 gigs means approx. 37376 minutes, or just under 623 hours, which is just under 26 days, a few days short of a month.

    Now if we're talking 128kbit mp3's, well then you're good for a few months.

    Not that anyone would *EVER* hoard that much copyrighted material, oh no, not us, that would be wrong...

  • seagate already has 50G (Score:3)

    by mysticbob ( 21980 ) on Friday October 15, 1999 @04:19AM (#1611906)
    i'm always bugged when a press release garners more attention than real products. seagate makes 50G drives today. you can get them today here [seagate.com].(also they have some drives which are slightly less than $10/G) or read the specs on the 50G here [seagate.com].

    cool -- large, but cool.

  • IDE will be a PITA (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    It will be a while before the IDE version shows up, but when it does will we be ready? According to the Large Disk mini-HOWTO [linux-howto.com], current systems can't handle
    a size over 33.8 GB. The problem is that with the default 16 heads and 63 sectors/track this corresponds to a number of cylinders of more than 65535, which does not fit into a short. Maybe no BIOS in existence today can handle such disks. Linux still needs a patch.

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