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High Density Storage 123

Posted by CmdrTaco from the more-room-for-mp3s dept.
Charlie Engasser wrote in to tell us about 216 gigabytes hard drives over at Seagate. Uses "Optically Assisted Winchester" (OAW), which "augments traditional magnetic read/write techniques with a laser to allow positioning so precise that it can store over 100,000 tracks across one inch of drive surface". I guess it just means in a few years we'll be able to do with video what we do today with sound. From this page.
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High Density Storage More

High Density Storage

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  • wow (Score:1)

    by drwiii ( 434 )
    It's amazing how much data is getting thrown around today when compared to when I was growing up. I remember having to make the most out of my 10 megabyte seagate drive. Makes me wonder where things will be in another 20 years (assuming we survive Y2K)...

    36 gigabytes on a two-sided disc, eh? Think M$ will make these a requirement to install Windows 2000?

  • The article mentioned a "two stage" head positioning process where the head is aligned with the regular moter mechanism, then precisely algined with a combination of strands of fiber and mirrors. This all sounds like it adds a lot of complexity to the seek process, and possibly a few milliseconds to the seek time. Does anybody have the real specs on this yet? Is it even a real product yet (the article was a little vague)?
  • Unfortunatly size is not the problem on those terabyte servers, seek time is. I know of one company that buys 18GB drives and only uses 2GB of those just to keep the number of spindles high. They constantly complain that no drive manufacturer is using these high density technologies to build smaller faster cheaper drives, but rather to build big expensive drives.

    EIDE is not going to be able to handle 100MB of access a second in random 4k blocks across all of the drives.
  • Well, I know several people today who have over 15 GB of 128kbps mp3s. If they were to switch from mp3 to a full-Cd-quality lossless compression (usually compresses around 50%), that same mp3 collection would now take over 75 GB. Leave the remaining 150+ GB for digital video editing.
  • I wonder how long it will take to fsck this things after a system crash. Probably have time to get a coffee, go to the movies (marathon) and then take a 2 week vacation before its done....
  • Posted by TikTac:

    If you did that you couldn't have nifty optimizations of file structure, including the nifty ext2 or hpfs file systems. There's also a new file-system out there that looked pretty cool (you can undo changes to files... nifty!) that would be broken too.
  • Posted by d106ene5:

    The price of storage for most of us is rapidly declining. The typical 6-9 GB that most users need is soon going to be going for next to nothing.

    Of course, then we'll need more!
  • Posted by mathman100@geocities.com:

    if you're running linux, you wouldn't have a defrag problem, and since it rarely crashes, you wouldn't have to go through all that junk that most OSs go through to scan the drives for errors. The only case i can think of would be the power going out, and if you have a backup power supply you should have a sufficent amout of time to restart.
  • >This is cool. I wonder if they will make this in a removeable drive?

    Any non-laptop drive can be removable. Just get a removable hard drive bay from any of the myriad sources, for example computergate.com. I do that with my Linux drive -- it makes sure my Windows partition doesn't mess with it!
  • Why, xfs of course!

    --Troy

  • Cool, but I'm not running IRIX. Linux needs a successor to ext2.

    Did you miss the announcement [sgi.com] that SGI's porting xfs to Linux? Apparently the only reason they haven't released code already is that their lawyers are still haggling over the license.

    --Troy
  • Depending on the specific formulation utilised, polycarbonate could withstand heat just as well as aluminium, while being stronger at the same time (Ever seen Gargoyles sunglasses? Ever seen how they survive gunshots?) Since plastic is lighter, it carries a smaller angular momentum, and thus requires a smaller amount of energy to give it spin. In such a case, you'd use a smaller motor, which means lower energy consumption, and less heat, and less chance of having a platter melt down inside the harddrive casing.
  • Well, no, I don't really think M$ alone will do that. We can al count on The Open Group to come up with X11R7, Motif 3.0, and CDE 3.0 to eat up availale hard disk space. And just so that the Open Source movement isn't left behind in the features race, GNOME 2.0 and KDE 3 to complement our selection. :op
  • As someone commented below, having more HDs increases performance. So instead of having one mumbo jumbo HD, have two, or three, or whatever you want. Then run fsck/badblocks/defrag in parallel (fsck can do this on its own, ;Windoze loses on this count :).
  • I remember the day I heard about something called a CD that would have 650 Megabytes on it! Ha Ha I thought you could never use that much. Never thought you would be able to write to one. Now I'm pissed because it takes so many to back my drive up to.

  • This reminds me that the first hard-drive had a whopping 5 MB of storage and was the size of two large refrigerators...

  • Yup, right here.. TRS-80 Model I with 16k and Level II Basic. I've still got the beast in a public storage facility.. all of the cassette tapes for it have long since turned to dust, but you can find large archives of TRS-80 software on the net that you can use in an emulator.. some of the emulators even have the ability to write out the programs to tape using a SoundBlaster.

    Gotta love that 500 baud tape squeal. ;-)

  • You don't remember an entire picture - you remember things about the picture, this object was over here, that thing was blue, etc. It's lossy compression with the quality cranked way down. Our memory is more about concept mapping (assembling a 'picture' of a party by remembering who was there and what they wore and what was talked about) than about digitizing every detail. 2.5GB? I believe it.

    I've heard that people who take "memory booster" courses eventually have to learn how to intentionally forget things, or else they have difficulty remembering new things.

  • You need to upgrade your imagination. Don't think about textual information or programs. That stuff may grow, but not so much. Think about *video*, recordings of your videophonecalls, recordings of your favorite tv shows and movies. What do you think comes after collecting mp3's? Collecting music videos, of course.
    --

  • Didn't HP come out with a DVD-RW drive? What is the difference between that and the DVD-RAM? And I read somewhere that said you can put data on these disks but you can't burn in and use binary executables?

    Today's English Lesson: Oxymorons

  • I've got it. The next big space eating improvement:

    video for everything.

    Your desktop background suddenly becomes a nice five minute long video loop of some waterfall, buttons sparkle prettily, nothing on your screen will EVER HOLD STILL! Thankfully, there will always be a command line.

    Huge amounts of data, and it'll suck up all that "extra" CPU power too.

    It'll be an Attention Deficiet Disorder nightmare.

  • Put it this way: whatever sort of lossy compression is going on, you have to be storing enough visual information to do some pretty amazing pattern recognition. You can recognize objects based on very small visual clues: you can distinguish similar-looking people's faces by small differences in their eyebrows, cheekbones, noses, etc., including people that you've just met and ones that you haven't seen in years. There are a lot of gold-colored 1997 Toyota Corollas on the road (look around), yet, even, when one is parked right next to me, I can usually tell at a glance which one is mine, probably by almost-subliminally noting differences in trim, scratches on the fender, seat covers, etc. This process has got to involve a lot more than 100 bits per second.

    The thing about counting yes/no questions probably means that they were trying to determine hoe many bits it takes to identify a concept, and hence how big the "address space" of concepts is, but this seems pretty ridiculous. The "space" of things that someone might pick in a game of "20 Questions" is surely a tiny portion of that of all human thought. The 100-baud figure has got to be based on the rate of speech, which is far from being our fastest, let alone our only, "I/O device". That said, I do believe in the concept of "mind uploads", and it might even be possible in our lifetime, but not with Jaz disks.

    Back to how to fill a 200GB drive: a (probably almost) TV-quality music video in MPEG 1 format is about 40MB, or about 10 MB/minute, or about the same size as uncompressed CD audio. DV format would be even better. Passing those around on the net like mp3s would be kind of prohibitive, but they could be distributed on CDs or DVDs. I could definitely see having a big collection, which would slurp up the disk space pretty fast.

    David Gould
  • Print that comment out and save it. Read it again in 3 years and see how silly it seems. I'm not being rude here, but if there is disk space, it will be used. It'll probably mean that people just won't ever delete files. More than likely it will be a sys-admins nightmare ;)
  • but what about when computing power and electronic devices are so good that ... 3D goggles are at a resolution higher than normal vision (and at a refresh high enough), artificial sound can simulate any normal sound and CPUs can run QuakeXX at so many frames per second that it's not funny? it's Malthus' problem, in another sense. one progression is geometric, the other arithmetic (or stagnant).
  • Once the computers that reside on most people's desktops are fast enough, and have enough/fast enough storage, the speach recognition that you will be able to do will be amazing. Products like NaturallySpeaking aren't using all of the technology/techniques that they could be just because the computers that would be required, wouldn't be practical. Here at CMU [cmu.edu] they've been doing speech recognition since the 70's, and there are currently projects [cmu.edu] in the works that blow away everything currently on the market... But they probably won't run on your computer.


  • Get in to digital video editing. it's not all that new, and it will use up your 11G drive very, very quickly.

    200Gig is a heck of a lot of MP3 or Word files, but it's really not all that much video.


  • MiniDV is 9 minutes per 2GB, so it takes even more space. So if you're determined to use up all the space, start by getting a new digital video camera ...

    D

    ----
  • There probably already is. Most of the surface mount chips that I know of are plastic encapsulated.

    --Bricktoad
  • 216 GB would store 365 hours of UNCOMPRESSED CD quality audio and make MP3 obsolete as a storage format.

    Combine that with a backbone built around the new 1.6TB network technology, and MP3 becomes obsolete as a transmission format.

    Which makes MP3 ... obsolete!

  • ugh... can you imagine good old fsck saying

    '/dev/hda1 has reached maxmimal mount count' ..

    just when you want to use ya computer quickly? .. you'd scream :D

    and don't mention windows sodding scan-shit .. that's AWFUL..

    Lovely to have the storage though.. and I don't believe the 'you could never use it all' lines.. you ALWAYS do :)

  • Games! (Score:1)

    by Simes ( 11695 )
    That's where it's all going to go, same as always. Already games are being shipped on multiple CDs or on DVD. This technology ensures you can go on installing them to your hard drive and enjoying the benefits of low seek rates and high retrieval speeds for all those MBs of data modern games throw about.

    Anyway, even if the common user doesn't have a use for 216GB, it'll put downward pressure on the price of 108GB drives, and that has to be a good thing :)

    --
  • That new Micros~1 help system.
    You know, the one with 30fps, truecolor video clips and CD quality SurroundSound renderings of a Gerraud (sp) shaded, texture mapped digital assistant.

    Remember back in the days when a harddisk was a commodity/expensive option? My XT had two 20MB drives - I was hot sh!t. I ran WP off of a floppy and was quite content.

    What's the size of a full install of MS-Word2k?? 100MB? Giv'em ample resources, and the kids in Redmond will run out of them.
  • MP3 archive? Everyone will have one.
  • Well then there'll be smell, taste and full-body sensory input.
    For smell and taste you may need the ability to do real-time
    molecular simulations, then produce arbitrary chemicals faster
    than a human can percieve.
    I personally am fascinated with the idea that given enough
    memory and system speed, one could digitize every atom in
    a human body. Then, a molecular simulation of such a set of
    atoms will render a full living human being inside a computer.
    That'd be the most straightforward pathway to true AI.
  • wouldn't you hate to be this guy ron? (i know he meant rom)
    my first computer...let's see, not counting that toy robot thing, was an ibm model 30 286 with a 20 meg hard drive...i still had it working up til last year, when i got mad and destroyed it. until 5 years ago, or perhaps before...20 megs still seemed pretty big, especially when you express it in bits...(i know the computer isn't that old...but i'm only 15.)

  • Video (Score:1)

    by Sloppy ( 14984 )

    Movies, Babylon 5 episodes, Hogan's Heroes episodes, etc. If you're like me, you have a bunch of videotapes. Point and click is easier than finding and loading a tape. Random access is nifty too. Think of all the neato things that could be done with a database and an index into a collection. Type "Schultz tunnel collapse" and click on "I'm feeling lucky" -- a second later computer starts playing clip of him walking in the compound and suddenly falling into a hole created by a collapsed tunnel. Run a voice recognition scanner to build text database of everything said. Now you can do dialog searches or view a montage of clips comprising every single time that Klink was threatened with being sent to the Russian front. Oh, to have them all at my fingertips with instant random access! That would be wonderful!

    Alas, since hard disks aren't forever, I would of course have to back that stuff up, so the tape manufacturers are necessarily out of business...

  • Fear of death?!? The bloat (or rather, the economy of scale created by the bloat) is absolutely joyous to exploit! If Win2004 uses 200 Gig, then that means millions of people will need 200 Gig hard disks. That means they will eventually get cheap. You'll be able to buy storage at a dollar per Gig whether you run a bloated system or an efficient one.

    My Amiga isn't complaining about her huge, fast, and inexpensive disks. :-)

  • Maybe that's what it will take to finally push you fsckers into getting a modern file system.

  • Most of your comments (cluster waste, frag, scandisk/fsck, formatting) are addressable by using/inventing better filesystems. But as for the seek time, I have a goofy idea: Use an "old style" fast hard disk as a cache (itself cached by RAM). ;-)

  • The idea of using optics to place magnetic heads isn't new. Sometime around 1991 there was a drive called the floptical for sale. It used optics to place magnetic heads on special floppy disks. Hardly a new concept, so I wonder what kept it from being used in hard drives for so long, especially since there was a working drive using the technology on the market about 8 years ago.
  • ok not for w2000 but for w3000 (just a few years later of course) ?

  • While it's cool that storage technology is getting so much better, it still doesn't completely help when that sea data has to pass through a straw. I'm hoping that advances in bus technology and communications will jump ahead in the near future to meet the requirements for pushing such data.

  • Ultra-high speed backbone technologies... CPUs too fast for most common tasks... ADSL... Now super-duper-humongous harddrives...

    I expect that within 2 years, we will have computers more powerful than we know what to do with -- most of our current programs simply do not use the available CPU resources already, and the same will happen with the storage and bandwidth. At that point, some totally new paragidm will spring up -- for nature abhors a vacuum. We will foigure out a Totally New Thing to do with our computers.

    What will it be, that will be able to tax all of those resources? True VR? Totally wired environment, with the computers as the master controllers? We have those things already... Heck, I wish I knew what it will be! (I'd probably become very rich if I did). One thing I am fairly certain of -- we are at the edge of a paradigm shift in computing.

    The New Thing (tm) is coming! The New Thing (tm) is coming!

    --

  • Re:The mind boggles (Score:3)

    by Victor Danilchenko ( 18251 ) on Friday June 11, 1999 @04:17AM (#1855646)

    I have no idea what I would do with over 200GB of storage. Mind you, that's what we think whenever a new high-capacity technology appears. Within a few years, it's the standard size and we all wonder how we coped with our old "tiny" drives.

    I think there is a cruicial difference: Always before, the technology was playing catch-up with demand. We always needed MORE space, memory, speed! The technology has now overtaken popular demand (not the specialized computer needs, of course).

    Let me tell you this: Since I got 11G drive a few months ago (in addition to my old 6G) -- rather cheaply, too! -- for the first time in my life, I have actually had free storage. LOTS of it. I have the content of a half-dozen CDs on my disks, a bunch of programs, some CD-games with full installation (you know, the kind which installd 500M straight onto the harddrive) -- and I still have space left. I am now trying to INVENT new uses for that space, whereas before, I was always trying to invent new ways to reduce my space usage.

    My point? The existing computer paradigm has nearly exhausted itself. We will need to figure out something radically new to do with our computers, in order to actually use all the power we are getting.

    --

  • Can anybody explain to me what the average user needs with such a large hard disk? I realize it's probably most beneficial to video editing and large databases. It seems that lately, though, the size of hard disks is vastly outpacing the application bloat revolution that has taken place recently.

    Not to specifically target Microsoft, but Windows is perhaps the largest application that immediately jumps to mind that a consumer might run. In the *worst case* scenario, Windows and commonly bundled applications might take up 2G of space. Yet the average drive size today appears to be 10G to 12G.

    It gets even more absurd when you consider alternative operating systems. I have BeOS installed with all the applications I need, and it takes up about 500M total. I have an 8.4G drive. I've installed Linux (Slack 3.6; 4.0's in the mail) in the not-too-distant past, and the installation indicated that even a complete full install would only hit ~370M.

    216G is an awful lot of space, but I can't seriously imagine that most of the "commoners" need anywhere near that. Can anybody provide me with a legitimate example where Joe Blow is going to need even half that space? (Beyond archiving MP3s and pornography, that is. :)

  • Programs that don't use all the CPU??? C'mon, even the fastest Xeon won't run Quake3 smoothly enough to make the average gamer happy. We'll use all this great technoogy to make better video games. Easy.
  • Exactly my thought. Using a Media 100, 15 minutes of high-quality digitized video eats up 2.5 GB. That's 10 GB/hour, and when you're editing video you're going to have lots of duplicate and useless clips lying around. We just bought a 144 GB hard drive array and we're still feeling cramped!!

    However, with the new hard drives that are currently available (18 GB or so), digital VCR's are starting to look very promising. I would really love to be able to tell the VCR to simply record certain shows at preset times, after which I could leisurely watch whatever shows I like in whatever order. Zero hassle, except of course if you don't have a good antenna. :-(
  • I'm actually currently working on a project that this could be great for. Mass storage of lots o' data. Like every manual for every piece of equipment this company has ever owned. Trust me its a lot. We actually figure possibbly around 100-200GB. With this we could have nice mirroring etc. Instead we're looking at arrays of 10 18GB disks. Personally I'd rather have a couple of the biggies in an array cuz I know we'll get more manuals.
    So no the average user doesn't nessecarily 'need' it. But businesses can definately use it.
    -cpd
  • 2.5G of data stored in the human brain?? Boggle. This is so far removed from reality it's not even funny. Humans store a great deal of visual information, which is heavy of bit usage. Besides, there are experiments which seem to indicate that people never forget anything they saw/heard. If you electrically stimulate the right spot in the brain, the experience will come back, very vivid and perfectly remembered.

    And top speed of storing data?? 100bps??? Close your eyes. Do you remember what you've just seen? How many bits per second is that? Aw, geez...


    Kaa
  • You don't remember an entire picture - you remember things about the picture

    Well, I don't know about you, but I have a reasonably good visual memory and frequently remember things by visualizing in my mind a picture of what I need and then scanning it for the specific detail/item I want. Lossy compression -- sure, but the quality is not as bad as you make it. There is *huge* amount of visual information stored in the brain, the problem is retrieving it. If I briefly think about my last vacation, for example, I can remember some stuff, but not all that much. But if I stop and really think about it, immersing myself into that experience, so much stuff that I actually remember pops up...

    And didn't say anything about the methodolody -- measuring the brain's storage capacity by checking how many yes/no questions you need to guess what an average moron thinks about? Gimme a break.

    Kaa
  • VR, Artificial Life, and ultimately,
    Mind Uploads.

    You know, I think the average AC could use a 5.25" floppy for the mind upload thing...
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • At the risk of turning this into a Yorkshiremen thread, I started out on a 1K ZX80. Later, of course, we got a real computer (BBC Micro), which had so many expansions they didn't fit inside the case, so we kept them in a cardboard box by the side of it connected with a ribbon cable. The biggest storage unit was a double-sided, double-density disk, weighing in at about 720k, IIRC.

    Of course, you know what the first thing we'll do with 200GB hard drives is. Fill them up, then complain that we only have 200GB hard drives and even cheap new machines come with 50TB. I mean, 200GB is hardly enough to store Windows 2005, let alone any applications...
  • >maybe Seagate's current drives have 6 platters in them?

    Duh, that's it, of course. ( 36 x 6 = 216 )

    So that assumes the existing drive configurations with this new density. Seems more likely you'll see different configurations at smaller capacities, at least in the near-term. There seems like a natural barrier to this being competitive with 14-25 gig drives for individual users until something over 50 gig is needed on a wide basis (read: by your average 3d gamer, not your 3d graphics designers).

    I wonder at what price/gig this new type of HD becomes practical for non-commercial applications, and an attractive and/or only alternative two 25+ gig drives?

  • Where does the number 216 come from? (Score:3)

    by Jburkholder ( 28127 ) on Friday June 11, 1999 @04:33AM (#1855659)
    I've re-read the press release a few times and don't see this number mentioned, only the density and "36 gigabytes on a single, two-sided disc or an equivalent of 25 Gbits/square inch, if applied to conventional drive technology".

    Was this number derived by extrapolating current platter sizes and density? Someone questioned what we would ever do with 200+ gigs in a consumer device, but I wonder if the real potential of this might be to make smaller drives with very large capacity that might go into other devices besides multi-purpose home computers? Devices where even a half-height, 3.5" are too big (portable digital audio/video devices, little electronic dogs, etc?)



  • This is the big promise of the whole convergence thing that we've all been hearing about.

    When everything starts to get come together, and networked. Imagine your "VCR" being hooked up to your computer w/Firewire or Gb-ethernet. Already there are video-storage systems by TiVo and ReplayTV that store video on an HD.

    Imagine this going the next step... hooking up phones and tvs and your security system and...

    ...Makes me really excited.

  • I wondered about this as well. With a drive of this kind of capacity I would think doing FAT lookups would be just brutal. Already for most servers it's better to go with 3x9 gig drives then buy 1 27 gig drive, and use striping. It's an awful lot of data to lose if your 200 gig drive fails! (Of course, you can always mirror...) I'm beginning to think we're starting to push the boundaries of magnetic storage as far as they can be usefully stretched. Well. Perhaps not.

    I suppose it should also be examined that a higher density doesn't necessarily mean they'll build a hard disk of that capacity - they could just make existing hard disk capacities, 9 gig, 20 gig etc. on hard drives that are physically a whole lot smaller! Of course, I wonder what the new system for aligning the heads does to power consumption... it would be nice to get 20 gig laptop hard disks. :) Hmm, it'd be nice to have a laptop, period. :)

    Something I've thought about as drives get larger would be dividing the FAT and data segments. Use solid state circuitry to store the fat - instantaneous lookups - and then the platter holds only data. This way, the heads don't have to scan back and forth while doing lookups. But, what do I know? :)

    Obasan

  • Suddenly those terabyte servers of the big guys don't seem that big anymore. Just get four of these suckers on an EIDE board and you're just about there.

  • That and jandrese's comment give me a better model for it (possibly).

    So what you're saying is Seagate shoudl concentrate more on expanding the "gate" and less on the "Sea"?

  • Didn't start with the trash 80 but wanted one.

    At our school we started with one Apple II with a tape drive - programmed in machine language for fun but I'd just type in the hex each time. It was faster than loading from a tape. Later came the Commodore PETs - 8k and 16k I believe - with tape recorders.

    I remember the suspense of waiting a few minutes to see if our programs would finish loading up okay.

    oh yeah, and the sound of FFing, REWing and listening to the tapes to find where to start loading if you had a bunch of programs on the same tape! Nowadays I gues I listen to 56k modem connect sounds instead.

    The more things change ...
  • I could use that space when I get
    a cable modem.

    I want to automate my web research.

    I'll need a cable modem so I can be connected
    24/7 and disk space to hold the information
    I collect.

    Like yesterday, I read speculation about why
    we bombed the crap out of Serbia. I started running searches for background material. Would
    love to automate that kind of thing.

    Someday.
  • Anybody else start life with
    a TRS 80 and a tape recorder?
  • full install of Office 2000 takes up 1 Gb!

    you sure about that one??? I installed a "Preview" on my Gateway/win PC nd i'm sure it only took up 300mb or so. Albeit thats still a lot of space but... anyway, maybe i didn't install everything, but i installed most of it, all of the main apps (The Premium Edition) and most of the optional crap (the launcher-bar ect)... oh well..
  • Oh, hooray, and how long will it take to move the data from that drive to the other? A week? With platter->bus transfer speeds not changing markedly, you get huge problems with data transfer speeds on multiuser system where you have random access to data on the device. 4 2 GB SCSI disks give 4 times the performance of 1 8 GB disk. Instead of larger but constantly slower disks due to more data per disk, it would be nice with cheaper or faster disks instead...
  • Oh goody, my pet peeve...

    First off, I'd like to point out that brains are fundamentally different in every way from digital computers: storage, processing, etc. Estimated about brain capacity in computing terms tend to be based on enormously flawed concepts, like guesses about how many bits are stored per neuron. (Short answer: none. The information is stored in the network, not the nodes.) I can't imagine what playing 20 questions has to do with memory; as for 100bps I/O, consider that you're brain is processing (and storing, though perhaps not permanently) everything in the environment, not just what you consciously perceive. (This has been studied, but I can't find the references.)

    Second, even assuming you could measure brain capacity this way, would it be meaningful? Is audio stored at .wav or mp3 level compression? Is visual data stored as complete frames or more like mpeg? Is the data actually compressed for storage, or is the (arguably) poor quality of memories a feature of how they recalled?

    Anyway, a few months ago I heard (several times, can't remember where) that the capacity would have to be more like 10 to 100 terabits, based on how much people can recall over a lifetime. I don't believe this either, but it seems much closer than a couple gigs.
  • 1. If FAT16 is wasteful on a 2+ gig drive, and FAT32 is wasteful on a 20+ gig drive, imagine how wasteful it would be on a 216 gig drive. (1mb clusters anyone?)

    2. Seek Time? Random Read Time? Not mentioned...
    I really don't want something in my computer spinning at 200k rpm

    3. Defrag??? It takes me the better part of a weekend to defrag my 4 hd's. (~30 gigs). There goes February.

    4. Scandisk. Fstab. Imagine accidently shutting the computer down instead of a proper one. Say goodbye to the work day.

    5. Formatting?

    You get the idea...

    RB
  • It is just that there are very few specs to go along with the drive to make an accurate judgement. The FAT, Scandisk, and defrag points are quite valid. There isn't a file system out there that is efficient at that level. Until we can get seek/read/write times, the other points are something to question.

    RB
  • Wadda you me "They"

    I did that with 5 meg PC HDs - Just call me an OLD Geek
  • OOPS!!

    Forgot to carry the 0.

    It was a rant, that's all.
    Would have used CALC.EXE if
    I were serious.
    Thanks for pointing it out.

  • Imagine what you can store!! (Score:3)

    by Larry1369 ( 35162 ) on Friday June 11, 1999 @04:24AM (#1855675)
    With a 216 GB hardrive.
    About 4,236 MP3's.
    I'm thinking about 3684 hours of music!!
    You can start a playlist and listen for
    153 straight days!
    MP3 has taken over sex as the #1 search in search engines.
    Imagine the sex that can be stored.
    All those pics.
    Let's say you store in JPEG format.
    Let's say at the high end, they average 200k each.
    (All us pervs know this is definitely high.)
    Over a million JPEGS!
    Imagine that slideshow!
    Man would you get hair on your palms and go blind.

    I had enough ranting.


  • Doh! I could find a way to fill it. Like replace my mp3's with full quality wav files, heh heh.
  • Well, I don't know about Joe Blow, but maybe he produces videos on a Nonlinear Digital Editting System. Did you know that uncompressed video runs about 15MB/second? Suddenly 216GB doesn't seem so huge when you can only store 4 hours of footage on it. (We currently struggle with arrays of 18GB drives, and we are constantly backing up one project to tape to do a different project.) 216GB would be _very_ useful.

    ttyl
    srw
  • As people find uses that actually store original/modified data on their drives, what will that do to those online backup companies? ;)
  • You know, you are probably right on this one...
  • You know, I was wondering the same thing - maybe Seagate's current drives have 6 platters in them? Of course, size wasn't mentioned...

    [pulls out napkin and pen]

    1 Gbit = 1024 bits x 1024 bits = 1048576 bits

    25 Gbits/inch^2 = 1048576 bits x 25 = 26214400 bits/inch^2

    26214400 bits/inch^2 = 3276800 bytes/inch^2 = 3200 Kbytes/inch^2 = 3.125 Mbytes/inch^2 = 0.003 Gbytes/inch^2

    Ok, so if we know that this thing can pack .003 Gbytes into a square inch, and that 36 Gbytes fit on a double sided platter, we can determine the size of the platter by...

    [furious scribbling ensues...]

    36 Gbytes / 2 sides = 18 Gbytes/side (duh)

    PI x r^2 = surface area of a circle

    So let's try a 5 inch platter (for a 5 1/4 inch drive):

    3.14159 x 5^2 = 78.540 inches^2

    78.540 inches^2 x .003 Gbytes/inch^2 = .236 Gbytes/inch^2 (???)

    OK - I suck at math - can anyone see my error? .236 Gbytes/inch^2 is nowhere near 18 Gbytes/inch^2 - unless those platters are huge...

    Help me, people...

  • 78.540 inches^2 x .003 Gbytes/inch^2 = .236 Gbytes/inch^2 (???)

    This should be the following:

    78.540 inches^2 x .003 Gbytes/inch^2 = .236 Gbytes/side (???)

    Sorry...



  • Dammit!

    OK - I suck at math - can anyone see my error? .236 Gbytes/inch^2 is nowhere near 18 Gbytes/inch^2 - unless those platters are huge...


    Should be:

    OK - I suck at math - can anyone see my error? .236 Gbytes/side is nowhere near 18 Gbytes/side - unless those platters are huge...

    Man, I suck...


  • OH MY!! OH MY!!! OOOOOHHHHHH MMMMMMMMYYYYYY!

    I think you're on to someth
  • Thank you for your corrections - my response:

    Mistake #1: Yes, this could have been done, but I wanted to try to avoid using any of the "published" numbers and work toward them...

    Mistake #2: Yep! That could be a problem - thank you for this correction...

    Mistake #3: Very true, very true...

    Once again, thank you...

  • I have two words - digital video. A little bird sung in my ear that Star Wars, in 320x200 window, takes 1.2 gb of space. How much would the whole movie occupy? - How _many_ 200 gB hard drives would one need to store one's favourite movies online?

    With digital movie distribution we're beyond needing 200 gB hard drives already! (Hell, a digital VCR could probably do with a bit more....)...


    Ehhhh... Did anyone say HDTV???? --- Ahhhh!!!! A 400 gB HD wouldn't be enough....


    Greetings from London
  • You're right, RocketBoy. Everyone should just stop trying to increase storage density. I always just format the first 31 megs of any drive I get and leave the rest alone. It was good enough for DOS 3.1, it's good enough for me.

    Removing tongue from cheek..........100%
  • Actually, FAT32 maxs out at 2 Terabytes and only uses 32K clusters at that size as I recall, can anyone confirm this?
  • Let's see...

    Mistake #1: You should have realised that 25 Gbits/in^2 * 1byte/8bits = 3.125 Gbytes/in^2, and saved your conversion from Gbits/in^2 to bits/in^2 to bytes/in^2 to Gbytes/in^2.

    Mistake #2: 1 Gbit = 1024^3, not 1024^2. So your calculations were off by a factor of 1024.

    Mistake #3: You didn't account for the spindle on the platter...

    My calculations...

    They said 105,000 tracks/inch, and 25Gbits/in^2, so that means we have 0.25Mbit/in linear density. If we assume a 3-inch platter has a half-inch spindle and a 1/4-in outside border, that gives us a 1-inch wide recording surface, with track radiuses ranging from 0.25-in (410Kbits) to 1.25 in (1.96Mbit), with an average radius of 0.75in (1.18Mbit), and 105,000 tracks, or 123700Mbits/side, or 15.1 GBytes/side. Close enough for me.....

    (going the other way, from 18Gbytes/side and 3.125Gbytes/in^2, simple division will give you 18/3.125 in^2/side, or 5.76in^2/side. My geometry assumptions give me 4.71in^2/side, so my answer being low is reasonable -- my geometry is also low...)
  • Thats a big mumma gigantic huge massive amazingly big woppa of a hard drive. my only question, how long does it take to do a surface scan?
  • This is cool. I wonder if they will make this in a removeable drive? Bye Bye Zip!
  • Haha. Windows 2000 and Office 2000 promise to use all of the space we give them (full install of Office 2000 takes up 1 Gb!). And as long as my applications appear in parts (border, menus, then everything flickers then appears), my CPU/System still isn't fast enough. I think that the "problem" of overly power computers is just an SEP (somebody else's problem. Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy people will know).
  • "Who actually needs 200+ Gb?"
  • Uh, figure that you collect largish MP3s at 5 meg each. That would be 43 THOUSAND mp3 files, not 43 HUNDRED.
    That's 5 months of 24/7 music before you hear a repeat.
    Hmm, W2k will take up about 600 meg. Figure the next version will take up an order of magnitude of more space as MS adds AI to the little paperclip. So 6 gig for the OS, still plenty of room.
    We are reaching the limit of magnetic-platter tech. The first work around I see is going back to 5 1/2 inch drives. Add more platters. Then they will have to stop using Magnetics to save information. Unless they figure out a way to write to a platter in layers like a DVD.

    Later
    Erik Z
  • This puts the fear of death into me. If you recall, major releases of M$ Windows seem to be initiated AFTER someone goes, "Holy shit, what am I going to do with all this hard drive space?!" Windows 3.1 et al came along as people were bathing in the luxury of DOS with an "excessive" 100 MB or so. And a few years later, as 800 MB drives were becoming commonplace, here comes Windows 95 to chew up an eighth or so of that.

    I can see all the M$ engineers scrambling furiously for their (overclocked???) PalmPilots to call meetings together to figure out how to devise a Windows that'll eat up 50 gigabytes or so of hard drive space.

    The thing that scares me most of all is that I think, if they were really motivated to, they could probably find a way to do it, too.
  • Within a few years, it's the standard size and we all wonder how we coped with our old "tiny" drives.

    Exactly.

    The problem is, the software needs more space just because it's available. Noone will pay more money to get a smaller/faster program if the hardware is big enough.
  • Sorry to be picky here, but I assume you want to be able to handle a petabyte drive, a drive with 10^15 bytes or 1e15, not 10e15 (that's 10 PB). I just get bothered when people make that mistake and if you meant 10 PB, sorry for assuming otherwise.

  • Every time a bigger hard drive appears, M$ must be thankful, since the size of their OS's are rising so fast that storage technology has a hard time keeping up. Will the new win2000 install disk have to be a DVD rather than a CD?

    Who would have realized that bugs and blue screens take up so much room? :p
  • I expect that within 2 years, we will have computers more powerful than we know what to do with

    Personally, I think we've long since surpassed the amount of computing power that we would know what to do with. Why else would we have screen savers? :-)

    Every day I ask myself what is really worth doing with a computer? Games are fun. Email is just a way to circumvent the post office. We are truly stuck on this constant search for a cool application of computers, but we have a harder and harder time trying to do it.

    Personally, the times when I first saw Wolfenstein, civilization (I), and scorched Earth, I got a lot more excited about computers than I ever do now. Now I just take ever expanding resources for granted - almost in a fatalist way. I refrain from buying new hardware now, knowing that hardware is just going to go obsolete long before I can get my money's worth out of it.

    The fact is, 95% of the computers out there are far overpowered for what any of their owners use them for. E-mail is not a CPU intensive task!

    Which brings us to SETI@home - go team Slashdot!

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As you will see, I told them, in no uncertain terms, to see Figure one. -- Dave "First Strike" Pare

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