News Hitachi to ship world's first 1TB hard drive?

[Tim S]

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2007/01...tb_hard_drive/

[DougEdey]

40c per GB is good, hope it translates directly over here, 30p per GB

EDIT: Is Q1 for the UK aswell?

[Mister_Tad]

Makes a nice solution for my offsite backups. High capacity tapes just aren't cost effective on a small scale.

May have to pick one of these bad boys up from the states when they're available if they're only going to make a $400 dent.

[Firehed]

Hope the price is right, not too far off the current sweet spot. 32MB cache? *drool*

[LeeV]

I dont think it will have a place on the computer for the moment but I think it will be good for PVRs or as a Backup drive, but puting so much data onto one drive is bad if it fails. You should buy several cheap drives and spread your data out on them.

[mikeuk2004]

I dread to think how long it takes to format. Be prepared to not need to use your computer for a few days or weeks while it formats

[Tim S]

Originally Posted by LeeV

I dont think it will have a place on the computer for the moment but I think it will be good for PVRs or as a Backup drive, but puting so much data onto one drive is bad if it fails. You should buy several cheap drives and spread your data out on them.

There's a DVR/Set top box version too, known as CinemaStar.

Welcome to the forums.

[JazX101]

Very nice, space enough to swing many cats, or whatever other animal you think might be disk compatable??
One thing that puzzles me is the way that hard disk technology is only advancing in data density: we have had 7200 spin disks as standard for years (not being entirely sure on how many, figures anyone??) without any notable change to the setup. Yes we now have SATA II, which increases the transfer speed while you're empyting the buffer, which takes only fractions of a second, for sustained transfer you're not even maxing out the P-ATA standard. Along with NTFS disk managment and NCQ with some drives, you're getting a slight improvement in performance. The only real change from standard is the Raptor drives, with their 10K spindle speed mean you can suck the data off faster, but how many people have the money to buy them?? You could also buy 15K spin disks, if you had a spare kidney you wernt using and wanted to sell.
Why dont the manufacturers actually improve the technology behind the drives themselves?? :
1Gb of flash ram is now easily under £20, if it were intigrated into the controller board of the drive, you could have the boot files for Windows on there, slashing boot-up times to daft levels! You could even have a flash ram drive, running programs only, giving split-second start up times to any application, then having a seperate Hard disk for data, files and media??
Increasing standard spindle speeds would be a bit more of a challange, but it would be possible if the interest was there from the market!
Something slightly more radical: If the hard disk case were to be extended for another couple of centimeters, there would be enough space for a second stack of read-write heads, allowing data to be taken off a disk at twice the speed, written at twice the speed, halving search times etc. You could even watch media from one part of the disk while writing new data to another part (think PC-TiVo without any hanging or lost scenes) The only area that would need development for that would be the control circuitry, to combine the 2 data streams into a single data stream to the computer, and to split the incoming tasks into single head tasks. Just think of the speeds on a dual head drive that also made use of higher spindle speeds, and large buffer/flash storage areas? mmmmm
Anyhow, enough of my coffee fueled ranting, I'm going to go watch a film!
Jaz_knos

[Mister_Tad]

The only manufacturer other than WD that there is a chance of seeing 10k or 15k SATA drives from is Samsung, as they (like WD) have no enterprise SCSI/SAS disks to protect.

low access times present little to no benefit to single-user access patterns so there isnt a great deal of need for them in the consumer market. Most enthusiasts aren't prepared to pay the premium on raptors given the slight real-world benefit seen from them, so the average consumer certainly isn't ready for it.

Something slightly more radical: If the hard disk case were to be extended for another couple of centimeters, there would be enough space for a second stack of read-write heads, allowing data to be taken off a disk at twice the speed, written at twice the speed, halving search times etc.

it isnt radical at all, its called RAID0, and it presents very little benefit (if any at all) in a desktop environment. This would also double the complexity of the drive, double the heat in the drive, likely more than double the cost and double the chance of failure.

[Sord_Fish]

Woo hoo just what i've been waiting for. Will be getting one of these for a diy NAS box hopefully ext3 wont be too bad on this

wheres winfs when you need it hehe.

[DXR_13KE]

once again: HUGE DRIVE FOR PORN!!!!!!!!! lets see if this doesn't cost a leg.

[Mister_Tad]

Did you read the article? $400

[JazX101]

Most of the heat in a drive comes from the central spindle, not the drive heads. I know that for the majority of the time, most people will never see their hard drive, or any other component for that matter, used to its maximum. Surely as members of the enthusiast community, who can get most twitched about minute differences in benchmarks, its not a matter of "well most people dont care" more a matter of "what if?"
Jaz_knos

[Mister_Tad]

The hard drive industry's bleeding edge, however, is not driven by the enthusiast community.

[HourBeforeDawn]

hmm Im going to wait until Seagate has theres out to offer a possible price drop but cool I have been waiting for a 1TB drive for my HTPC project ^^

[Lowsidex2]

Bah... I'll get excited when they release a drive with 1TB of formatted space. What will this have, less that 900gig usable? False advertising IMO.

[David_Fitzy]

it isnt radical at all, its called RAID0, and it presents very little benefit (if any at all) in a desktop environment. This would also double the complexity of the drive, double the heat in the drive, likely more than double the cost and double the chance of failure.

I reckon JazX101 has come up with the same something I dreamt up a while ago. I wouldn't call it raid 0 as you're using the same surface to read from. Raid means redundancy the only redundancy would be if one head failed the second could still be used.
I think he means two sets of heads per stack of platters (one front, one back) coupled with an updated NCQ I reckon it'd work really well doubling the throughput(ish) even going upto 3 maybe 4 sets of heads (in a wider package)
Like this:

A new NCQ could not only reorder packets/requests to be written/read efficiently it could assign them to a head depending on the head's position on the drive. Idling the heads could sit at the 1/4 mark and 3/4 mark to improve access times, heavy contigous access could use both heads at the same position reading alternate tracks.

[Cthippo]

Originally Posted by David_Fitzy

I reckon JazX101 has come up with the same something I dreamt up a while ago. I wouldn't call it raid 0 as you're using the same surface to read from. Raid means redundancy the only redundancy would be if one head failed the second could still be used.
I think he means two sets of heads per stack of platters (one front, one back) coupled with an updated NQC I reckon it'd work really well doubling the throughput(ish) even going upto 3 maybe 4 sets of heads (in a wider package)
Like this:

Great idea! The SATA and especially SAS systems can already move more data than the drives can squirt at them, so doubling the read capacity might finally allow drives to live up to the potential of their busses.

[David_Fitzy]

To go to the extreme...



Someone forward this to R&D at seagate (all i want is a freebie (or 8) when they're made)

EDIT: Imagine putting a drive window on this

[r4tch3t]

I think quite a few of us have thought of this before (I was actually thinking one for Read, one for Write, but this design does that and can also get faster reads and writes.)
The only problem would be more advanced firmware to orient the heads to work together. And if it was retrieving a large file and was using both heads, the OS would most likely have to piece it together.
As for the RAID 0, does it actually get different parts of the file? I thought both Hard drives retrieved the whole file.