News Seagate hints at 8TB, 10TB hard drive launch plans

120Gb?
My first ever hard drive was 20Mb...you young whipper-snappers and your gigabytes
I remember working with Sun Microsystems back in the day when they were selling terabyte storage that cost tens of thousands...pence per gigabyte? Try hundreds of pounds per gigabyte!

 

I HIGHLY doubt it's actually 34MP. Hell, even many 12MP or 16MP photo cameras are just 8MP with interpolation and other processing effects to make it seem like the advertised resolution. Or, sometimes it might have the hardware capability for the advertised MPs but doesn't have the ability to actually resolve the image properly. Here are a couple sources on the matter:
http://iconophor.com/megapixel-mp.html
http://snapsort.com/learn/sensor/true-resolution

I am no photographer, but cameras are one of those dangerous markets to get into because it is so easy to get scammed.

 

Games take up the vast majority of drive space on my machine. I love the fact that I can back up my Steam library. But for non-Steam games, it seems like every time I uninstall one, sure enough a few months later I'll get the urge to play it again. Then I have to bust out the disks, make sure I have the key, install it, then update it. Gets to be a pain. I'd rather just have more space so I don't have to uninstall.

I've actually got two 240 GB SSDs and a 2TB drive laying on a shelf right now just waiting for me to get around to backing things up again so that I can move my OS around and pull out my older raid setup.

 

As a suggestion, game media (audio and cutscenes) usually end up taking up about 1/4 of the total game data, more or less depending on the game, and usually never gets updated. If you look into linking, you could burn the game media on a DVD and symlink to it. Your loading times will barely be affected (for some games it might improve) and you save an immense amount of disk space. If you have a blu ray burner, you could put the media of several of your games on the same disc.

I'm not sure how difficult it is to accomplish this in Windows. On the topic of saving disk space, in both Windows and linux I managed to run some old games in compressed folders from a single-layer DVD. I did this for experimental reasons, and proved that compressing the data makes a HUGE difference in improving loading times. You can only do this to games where none of the files in the game's installation folder get modified.

For the record, linux is better at and easier to accomplish either of my suggestions.

 

My smartphone shoots in 1080p and I'd like to keep 'almost' all of it. I could slim it down but I'd rather not devote the time and energy TBH. I want enough capacity around so I don't have to manage it from day to day.

That's why I have a 64GB Smart phone, and a main computer with a 512GB SSD and 7TB of attached storage for media and redundant backups. There's another 4TB attached to the family media player and another few TB of offline backup and 'old stuff I should sort out one day'.

Then there's the cloud backups...

 

Believe many conspiracy stories? I follow a lot of tech & photography blogs etc and can't remember the last time I read about a device that had less MP than it was advertised at.

Nearest I can think of is the iPhone 5S Slow-mo mode, that's rendered out at 720p but actually something closer to 480p upscaled. Their normal resolutions are true though, only the slow-mo gets the upscaling. The camera is still the same res as advertised.

If you know otherwise, care to tell us which cameras fit under your 'many' banner?

 

I store a lot of large CAD files (500MB-8+GB) on my machine, the space fills up fast. I have a drive dedicated to holding thousands of high resolution textures (50-60MP) for use in 3D work, again the file sizes get pretty big for uncompressed files.

Having a large drive like one of these and another for backup would be really handy, would make things smaller and more efficient, which is always a good thing.

I'm still holding out for ditching HDDs altogether though. Sadly for my uses things aren't quite there yet, but once 2TB SSDs reach the price of ~750GB ones now, I'd be pretty tempted to make the jump given I could just put my current drives into a NAS to offload some of the data.

 

That's the entire point of marketing... The actual image itself WILL be the claimed pixel range but it doesn't mean the quality will be the same. A camera can claim to be 34MP but with enough software magic and/or product technicalities (for example, maybe its 34 mega subpixels) the average consumer will never know if it's not truly 34 until they see the technical datasheets. But to digress, at such a massive resolution, it's way too hard for the average person to spot a "fake" resolution. The high numbers help make people feel like self-proclaimed professional photographers, and sometimes, it's just the thought that matters in the end.

But a great example of this sort of misleading marketing is hard drive storage. If you get a 500GB hard drive, you're really getting 500000000000 bits, not bytes. So you lose (I think) roughly 10GB of storage.

Like I said, I'm not a photographer so I don't know of any models off the top of my head. But a few posts back I showed 2 links that explain different causes of cameras with faked resolutions. I'm SURE you can find plenty more sources that include more info, including a list of cameras.

I'm sure that you could determine yourself which cameras have a fake MP value just by looking through stores like amazon. Check the average price for a really high MP (such as 34) and then compare that price to the lowest priced camera with that MP. If the price seems too good to be true, that's because it probably is.

 

If I'm understanding you, I think maybe you're mixing up your arguments slightly.

The real issue isn't so much the number of pixels as it is the size of the CCD / CMOS capturing them. A higher quality, (physically larger) 12MP CCD will produce far better quality images than a cheap 20MP CCD, simply because it is able to capture more light. The race for higher MP's can then become a misleading selling point: Much like the MHz wars in CPU's. The CPU's did run at the quoted speed, it just wasn't necessarily the best way of measuring quality.

As an example:
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-yRviN2oksWY/Tt6ckbnl-TI/AAAAAAAAA_8/LQx6Gv2N7SU/s1600/sensor_table.gif

(There's loads more sensor sizes than this, it's just a nice graphic example I had tucked away)

A cheaper camera phone may have a 1/3" CCD compared to a 4/3" CCD in a dedicated camera, they may both have the same number of quoted pixels, but the 1/3" CCD has less than 1/10th the surface area in which to capture light. They're still real pixels, just not as good.

Casting no aspersions on anyone's particular phone (I know very little about phones) I know some makers have started putting larger CCD's in their phones - I was just making the point in general...

 

jrs, you can't be rude to people and then expect them not to become defensive - that's not how things work. As for the rest, do you really think you're the only person with troubles and worries in life? Please. Most of us have hardships and problems to deal with, we just choose not rub them in other peoples faces for brownie points.

And by the way, I'm curious, how does having a single 10TB drive waste resources anymore than a single 1TB drive?

And, while I'm thinking about it, how does throwing away stuff you've already bought and used make you any less capitalistic than someone who shoves it in a cupboard thinking "that may come in handy one day"? If anything it makes you more capitalistic, as the person who saves stuff may actually reuse some of it at some point - clearly not an option to someone who tossed it. Minimalism and environmentalism aren't necessarily the same thing.

Not meaning to offend you or anything...

 

Ah yes, CPU frequency is definitely a better example. What you are describing is basically what I was getting at but more focused on the hardware level, and worded better. I was describing more about how the software makes the not-so-great hardware seem better, whereas you're describing why the hardware is different. Anyway, both points are relevant to each other.

 

if we did not grease the wheels of capitalism, we'd still be using stone tablets to store our words and smoke signals or semaphores to communicate over long distance.

Not to split hairs, but the higher capacity disk is the exact opposite of building new garages to store more junk, its about compressing it better in a unit with broadly the same external dimensions. Going all the way back to the original article and comments, I don't think manufacturers are targeting higher density arbitrarily, they are responding to demand either directly communicated or calculated based on trends analysis, else they would be throwing money away pointlessly.

 

I think the point jrs77 is trying to make is a lot of people get more and better things simply because more=better, regardless of how much that actually applies to an individual's work flow. The underlying problem, though, is people don't realize that the surpluses of resources they acquire encourages laziness of maintenance and organization, so when you use a slower computer or when you want to find 1 photo, you're going to get frustrated. Unfortunately, Windows caters to poor maintenance, and Mac caters to poor organization.

In the server world, which these 10TB drives are intended for, there are some real practical uses for them that no average home user would understand.

 

This thread has gotten pretty ****ing weird for a bigger storage story :/

For the record, I ALWAYS appreciate increased storage.