1TB milestone reached

thats pretty awesome however im more worried about how the thing will perform i still think even tho with all the improvements going on that hdds have a long way to go

It will perform better, how much no one knows.
The 750GB seagate drive used 5 platters.
This new 1TB drive uses 4.

This means Density is a bit greater which means faster reads and writes.
I am eagerly waiting for this guy.

vertical recording is actually slower than the standard non-vertical drives, it just allows more data density (bigger capacity) is all.

1 Tb, that's a lot of porn. 8)

I already can see the ads:

"Store your favorite photos, movies, music and files on a Seagate Barracuda 1 Terabyte harddrive! Seagate - Store the content of your life.


Buy now and get a tube of Astroglide for free!"

8O

You got me worried there.

Its easier to increase size in big increments (since, comparatively speaking, the amount of space on disk platters is huge compared with the size of the magnetic granules, small increase in magnetic density reap huge wins), its much harder to decrease access time and the decreases come in much smaller increments because fundamentally you are fighting a mechanical process. Think about CD->DVD->BR/HDDVD - the storage rates have gone up by a huge factor but it still takes a butt load of time to move the head from one edge of the disk to the other, settle it, focus the lens (not sure what the equivalent is for hard drives but I'm sure there is one), locate the heads actual position on the disk and then wait for the correct data to come by.

Its possible that the only way we can acheive better access times (I mean in the order of one or two magnitudes rather than a ms here or there) is to go with completely different technology like holographic memory that have no phyiscially moving parts.

oh well we shall see.

Well they could do that, and the performance may be great. But, and it is a very big but, at first it will be very expensive, and it will take very long to be out in the market in full force (meaning cheaper and has enough density), probably 15-20 years or more.

Like what Seagate states about full flash hard drives, they don't see the need to shift to manufacturing flash drives, as simply the cost of magnetic hard drives is way smaller than manufacturing flash based hard drives.

That´s exactly the attitude that forced IBM out of the desktop market, that made Bill Gates make his infamous memory statement and that will ruin Seagate if they don´t watch out.
Just look at what flash memory cards did on the market already. They did what Zip-drives and lots of other in-between devices failed to do - they made the floppy (almost) obsolete. Then take a look at the prices of 1 or 2 GB memory sticks and compare them with the prices of the same sticks last year. The market for NAND memory isn´t getting smaller. Intel, Micron and Samsung are expanding their fabs and competing for speed and size.

Look at these prices and then tell me again that you really believe it´s going to be more than three or four years until SSDs are widely available?

I already can see the ads:

"Store your favorite photos, movies, music and files on a Seagate Barracuda 1 Terabyte harddrive! Seagate - Store the content of your life.


Buy now and get a tube of Astroglide for free!"

8O

You got me worried there.I guess you guys don't remember this?

http://money.cnn.com/2006/11/30/ma [...] /index.htm

You don't have a flash drive?

Sorry, I'm having a hard time wrapping my mind around this one.

When I made a year at work they made quite the show of giving me a 2G drive because I'm internally famous for walking up, plugging in my "dongle", and fixing systems. Later, as I was adding it to the keychain I keep them on the boss asked what I was doing. I told him what I was doing, adding it to the 2-1G's and 2-4G's I already had. He took it back. I now have an 8G from the company. Kripes, I got 3 128's and 2 64's this year from sales reps. Loaded them up with MP3's and regifted. My *kids* have 1Gers.

Nope. Still can't get it. Not gonna try anymore.

The rewrite-problem bothered me too. Thats why i won´t buy any of those hybrid drives. I think an external Stick will do fine to speed up boot times. The thought of buying a hd and the Flash part breaking down after 2 years while the rest of the HD is still good for another five scares me off.
Yet i´m certain they can and will improve the limit. The question is how far can they improve it and will it be fast enough before another technology emerges.

Nice read. I read about those nano-tubes before. As they already mentioned, they have to get production to a level that can compete with flash. And that will take quite some time. Makes me think though. Hopefully flash is just a intermediate solution then.

You've made a valid point. I completely forgot about the write-leveling feature. Still though flash is still slow compared to other Tech's over the horizon. It can still act as a go between between the techs.

Though I probably never pay for one of these drives till the cost comes down from ~$15 per gigabyte to somewhere around 5 or less. That'll only happen with smaller processes.

To those who wavered from the discussion to the portable flash drives. I wasnt talking about them. In fact I fully imbrace Flash and the prospect of Solid state drives is a great thing to have.

Waits for a bigger flash drive and smaller processes to drive costs down.

Well my media server uses 2 500gb in raid 1. I will use this new technology to buy more cheaper 500gb drives as that seems to be right amount per drive.

100gigs per category stored is about right for the average downloader.

I.E 100gigs of music
100gigs of video (nondvd)
100gigs of TV
100gigs of games
100gigs of random files.


Then back it all up using raid (ya i know not really a backup solution). I need a 500gb drive to back up my 500(x2) raid 1 array.

---------------------
I was impressed with the first 1gb drives, the 20gb drives, the 40,80,160,.... then size really didnt make a great impression any longer. The 1tb is fabulous, but I dont consider it as big as a break through as the 1gb was.

I dont think I will be impressed again until I see 100tb drive, or 1000tb drive.

I would rather see Holographic technology become main stream, rather then seeing a 10/100tb drive. I have been following the technology for 10 years, and I am pleased to see the first disks coming out.

I know... I am just saying that 100gb per category is fine... and I could have named many more then 5, and most people wouldnt be collection 100gb of those.



and ya 1000=petabyte.

But I like long drawn out numbers.... like 1000 million (billion)

depends who you ask. If you ask Seagate.. there are 1000gb in a PB. If you ask Windows, therea re 1024.

This raises a good point.

Why aren't they faster? Why don't they use higher rpms? Well... physics. I'm not going to go too far into detail but the reason SCSI, SAS and raptors can move so fast are because they use smaller platters. If I'm correct, raptors only use 2 platters (although I could be wrong, please correct me if the info is bad). The smaller... and sometimes fewer platters allow the motors to move faster to lower latency and whatnot... thus increasing throughput.

EDIT!: I understand that most people don't even need 1TB, but... I am one of those few people who would benefit from it. I ONLY use .wav files for my music... so that right there takes up tons of space (I have a band... that records... and we like the higher fidelity formats), that... and I have TONS of anime... most of it consists of fansubs... but that's besides the point. So... I've decided to get 6!(not 6 factorial... just six) of these TB hdds (and yes... I would actually be able to fill quite a bit of that up) and... put them in RAID 5...

You bring up a great point, and honestly, I have no idea why they don't make them faster... and ya... I don't like cheetahs... I've had too many of them die on me. I prefer Fujitsu's SCSI and SAS drives... much more reliable... and cheaper too!

And I agree with you... not many people really need a 1TB hdd... but then again... not everyone needs an X6800 or a QX6700 or an 8800GTX either!

One good thing about ever-increasing HD sizes, is that it drives down the price of "normal" drives(i.e. 250GB/320GB). Being able to get 250GB for under $100 is nice.

Actually, thats not a bad idea. The thing is, if your motor(bearings,etc.) goes..you still lose it all. I doubt they could use 4 seperate motors.

Actually, thats not a bad idea. The thing is, if your motor(bearings,etc.) goes..you still lose it all. I doubt they could use 4 seperate motors.

The internal RAID system will be more reliable and redundant. Think of it as 4 completely seperate/enclosed super-slim drives in one 3 1/2" case. If one drive actually does fail, just replace the platter and the data gets recreated. Anyway, a lot more can be done.

I don't believe that's a problem.

The controllers on all modern flash memories do write-leveling, where each write to the device is evenly distributed across all the flash memory available. In other words, if you constantly load a file, update it, and save it, the file isn't saved to the same block of flash memory every time. The write hardware ensures that it is saved to whichever block of flash has currently been written to the least. Thus, over time, the write logic evens the wear on the entire device, making it so that no one block of memory approaches 100,000 writes before others.

To see the margin to failure that this gives you, lets do some quick calculations for a heavy-use hard drive. Let's assume the following:
[*:5773e679eb]64MB of pagefile updates every 1 minute = 184,320,000 blocks updated per day (block = 0.5K).
[*:5773e679eb]5MB of registry updates every hour = 240,000 blocks updated per day.
[*:5773e679eb]10MB of files updated every 15 minutes = 1,920,000 blocks updated per day.
[*:5773e679eb]20MB of Windows updates, updated every week = 5714 blocks updated per day.

Total 512-byte blocks updated every day (for 24-hour/day operation) = 186,485,714.

For a 32GB flash device, the device has 62,500,000 512-byte blocks, each of which can handle 100,000 writes = 6.25 x 10^12 writes available.

6.25E12/186485714 = 33,514 days, or 92 years until a block reaches 100,000 writes and fails.

That's for fairly heavy hard drive use. If the computer has enough RAM, the pagefile updates go away, extending the life significantly.


That´s an excellent point! I didn´t think of that. Yet, there still is a problem.
The write-leveling can only work with the free parts of the flash drive. So filling a flash drive up to 90% would wear it out 10 times faster since the write logic could only use the remaining 10% for leveling. If i use the flash drive for a p2p programm now, you have a lot of writes within a very short time. The more you fill it up, the faster it breaks down. Okay, if i fill it up to the 90% i mentioned it´s still going to last quite a while (simply put 10% of what you calculated), which should still suffice.

Another good argument. With mechanical drives its just hit or miss. They either work or they break. At least in most cases. In that matter i´d really prefer a slowly fading Flash drive instead of a header crashed mechanical one.

1 word: fansubs. They take up a lot of space... with the amount I have. Honestly... 2TB would be great. All my .wav files and anime... *drools*.

I agree with MarkG on this one.

There's a lot of recreational computer users that wouldn't need more than 20 gigs since all they do is surf the web and use spreadsheets.

There's also a lot of people like the tomshardware type that downloads huge amounts of data (legal and illegal, but i'm not going there). I know a guy who has over 1TB on optical storage and another guy who has 4.5 TB on optical storage as well.

These are the kinds of guys that need large drives.

I do disagree with the increase in drive size. If raid 5 was incorporated ( i forget who mentioned it, but YOU deserve the credit), then no worries.

I'd stick with a RAID card and buy 400 gig drives x12 and had 4.5 TB without worrying that one dead drive will mean i lose all my data.