News Seagate says: 300TB drives by the year 2010

I'm basing my assumption on current speeds, which for me is 10Mb.

This year NTL are due to go 25Mb along with Blueyonder and various ADSL providers, so I'm assuming in 2010 there will be the notion of 50Mb connections.

On my 10Mb I can download a 5Gb retail quality dvdr in just over an hour, so in several years time I'd expect it to complete in 15 minutes or so...

I think highlighting the need for bigger hardisk sizes is not altogether irrelevant?

 

But it didn't really even do that did it? I'm not even sure you're correct. Right now there really is very little need for bigger disks. The vast majority of consumers could easily be satisfied by a few hundred gigs for their holiday photos on their digicam and the few hundred mp3's they've downloaded.

And those (very very few, compared with the gen.pop) of us who're on a mission to download the entire interweb just RAID or shove a whole load of disks in there and get on with it. Bigger drives really aren't that neccesary at all right now. Just desirable.

 

I agree they arn't neccesary for the vast majority, however it's always the small minority of enthusiasts who push things forward in technology.

In a couple of years time though when HD material really hits it's commercial target, 'gen.pop' as you put it there will be a need for much larger storage space.

And personally my case can only accommodate two hardisks due to the watercooling setup, so I'm actually having to buy pretty expensive £500+ external NAS box to store all of my music and films on...

 

The question is...how much will they cost? Though, by 2010, I'd imagine most games would be at least 15GB+ each. Hell, Medieval 2: Total War is already 9GB.

 

I think solid state memory is going to become the standard, so mechanical storage would have to remain competitively priced...

 

Never underestimate human ability to generate data, and in particular horde it. Think about all the books, paper, CDs, DVDs, games, software, video tapes, audio tapes, PC video, MP3s, pictures, text documents, PVRs, etc... in your collection. Quite a lot of that uses lossy compression to get it on the medium or is limited by the devices it will be used with, but tech moves on at an incredible rate.

300TB may seem a lot, but think about it archiving every bit of data you own and it starts to make sense. I seem to remember it will take about 80 yottabytes (YB), a YB is 1,099,511,627,776 terabytes or a terabyte ^ 2.

 

speed speed speed.

the only reason i stick to 2x80Gb of Seagates for my Windows is becoz its the fastest for my RAID-0 array. just SATA2 just aint cutting it anymore.

transferring a couple gig of movies over SATA2 isnt fun. when 300TB drives (which im sure will be available. what do u think the max capacity of drives 5 years back?) arrives, games, movies, files n whatnot will be bigger. even the operating systems. and moving them across SATA2 will be a pain.

come out with SATA4 or whatever, or make cheap SCSI outof it, and ill get one of those terras...

afterall, i got 2x250+ 1x320 + 1x160 + 2x80Gb (RAID) almost full and now watching for more drives but i coudlnt get them coz i cant fit anymore drive into my small HTPC case..... bigger capacity drive will make sense, no?

 

Actualy you can buy cartrige holographic drives they store about 300gb per discs and are marketed at large companies and cost about £100,000 per drive.

 

Some dumb Will use this to recopy the same files on the harddisk lol !!!

I cant get why they will make 300TB maube for the central world server !!!

also on 2010 harddisk will be old , there some thing new im sure !!

Thanks . CK

 

Well, I've got 7.5 TB online now in my self-built media server, but I'm in the video production business and therefore have need for a ton of storage.

However, on this article, as someone who has followed and participated in the storage industry for about 15 years, I have two thoughts:

1. The timetable is too tight. While the capacity will get there, it won't be there in 3 years. Even if technically possible, the market demand won't be there yet. Smart companies like Seagate don't bring products to market until there is sufficient demand. They don't just throw products at the market willy-nilly...they are in business to make money and the cash cow must be milked with incremental upgrades.

2. Just as with the numerous 750GB drives I buy today, that are readily available, they may as well plan on selling these in 2-packs. Once you get above the 1 terabyte level with online storage, your list of available options for fast, cost-effective backup gets really short. Plan on keeping hard-drive based backups of your stuff. Whether you keep the backup drive(s) 'online' or 'offline' will depends on your situation.

 

Man I Work video production business I cant see that I need more than 100Gb When I'm working After I complete the ( part ) or the project I copy it to 8.5 GB DVD and clean my space to be ready for anther ( part ) or work !

Of course not Movie production !!! Because I saw there studios and I worked with them they use a KICK ASS server with 5 TB for each Movie !!

This Just form My point !! , Thanks , CK

 

Tbh, i can see these 300Tb drives becoming literally storage drives.
Which smaller, faster, drives being used for the OS.

 

Whatever, we were told of usable optical discs for all, mainstream market type jazz. My point is that, these technologies get people excited and they talk about how great it could all be, but frequently we don't see what they envisage.

Umm, what? You're using 7200.9's which as far as I know aren't SCSI drives, and even if they are they're comparatively very slow against almost all other SCSI. Why on earth do you think SATA 2 "aint cutting it anymore"? It's 300MB/s! 3-4 times more data can go through there than any disk you stick in there is going to produce.

As for the idea that 2x80GB 7200.9's would be faster then a couple of modern WD or Samsung T series 500's, you need to start doing some reading if you reckon it's so, because modern drives continue to improve on bandwidth and those things ain't gonna be coming close to big perpendicular drives.

 

How much hotter will these run?

I suspect these will be hotter & require more power but if not then I'd like to see drive sizes shrink so laptop size drives become the standard.

 

I'm still waiting for the 1~tb drives to come out, to me thats a technical land mark. The one thing that still gets me is the way they still count 1000 instead of 1024.

Also dont forget with great power comes great responsibility, what file system would be able to keep up with that kind of drive? Fragmentation would be a massive problem, well with ntfs anyways.

Another thing i want to see, which this massive amount of storage being available is more IPTV style on demand systems like the xbox live film market having the content at your fingertips with no format war crap to deal with, and with higher bandwith broadband becoming the norm HD content isnt that unrealistic.

 

You've touched on something there. What will drive massive storage increases in the mainstream market is media storage...specifically, HD video storage. Reliable bandwidth for on-demand HD movies is a pretty finite quantity, and will remain so for some time, so the content industry is going to be looking for ways to deliver you content that can be cached at your local drive, and then streamed to your display device. More people are going to embrace the concept of home media servers that begin to integrate all media and this will also drive demand for more storage.

Higher quality/less compressed forms of HD video delivery will be possible only once both the bandwidth and storage capacity are there.

Along this continuum (which will evolve for the next 10 years or more), I see 2007 being the year that DRM grows up and gets real. Before you get too excited... much to our chagrin, DRM will not go away, but it WILL, however, start to move to more reasonable levels. The music industry seems to be moving in this direction (DRM free downloads for a higher price) sooner than the movie industry, but they've been generally late on all things digital....

I think history will look back at the failed launch of the ZUNE as the tipping point where consumers rejected oppressive DRM in such a dramatic way that it actually sent a strong-enough message to the content industry to reform themselves, and it may actually start a movement in that direction.

Of course, none of us will really ever get what we really want (DRM free everything)...just more 'reasonable' terms is what will result.

Anyway, back to storage: all this content needs to be stored, and this will drive the demand for more,bigger hard drives. Oh, and faster home networking.

 

Get ready for week-long defragging sessions, you'll have to schedule them for the same time as your holiday plans!

 

Except that is, for the hundreds of millions who choose to take what they want on their own terms.

 

I'm sick of the increases in capacity. Yes I can always dump more recordings from Media Center or download more through torrents, but current Hard Drives are so behind the technology that surrounds them. You know what, I'm sick of every HDD dying after 4 years of everyday usage. I'm sick of having to buy almost double the amount of storage I need just for backups. Increase the goddamn speed, and make them more reliable. Then go continue increasing the size.

And I feel pathetic, that broken HDD's and huge backup HDD's just drive the market. Companies make money of your drives failing and breaking, and that is so fuc*** up.

Hard Drive is probably the most important component of a computer, yet it seems to be most outdated.

[cries and runs outside in order to ignore Windows Disk not formatted error of his 240GB photo/video HDD]

 

I'd reckon they'd get about 100Tb by 2010. What I like though is that flash memory keeps getting faster and it's capacity sits about 100 times less than HDD capacity pound for pound how about a few 1Tb flash drives in your pooter?

Solid State is what I reckon most people like us (enthusiasts) will be drooling over while joe public will be showing off their 100Tb Mech-Clunk-ical drives and screaming when they lose all their data.