Hitachi Breakthrough Could Mean 4TB Disks By 2011

[Cloudsurfer]

WOW... although totally un-necessary that would be awesome!

I DARE someone to fill up a 4TB drive.

Of course thats what used to be said about 4gb drives too

The bigger your drive is, the more you'll find to fill it up.

80 gigs used to be enough, now 500 gig just won't cut it.

 

[Consultant]

Sounds promising, but it's four years away and it wont actually be 1TB will it... it'll be 9XX MB

LOL... 1TB formatted turned into 9xx MB, that's probably after install of the windoze Bloattiwa.

I'll stick with OSX and have it formatted to be 9xx GB. =p

 

[FF_productions]

WOW... although totally un-necessary that would be awesome!

I DARE someone to fill up a 4TB drive.

Of course thats what used to be said about 4gb drives too

HD videos can probably fill up a 4 TB drive.

DV, your looking at almost 500-600 hours of video (guesstimate).


It's very cool to see that hard disk technology is still advancing.

Hitachi is doing a great job.

 

[anubis]

People who love music have large collections and would like to have them
on their portable player in uncompressed format. I hope a 1TB iPod is
produced, before it is too small to hold all my music. If you want to
have the small number of tunes you like compressed down to a state
where you can barely hear them, buy a shuffle.

Oh, wow! You are absolutely right. Uncompressed music has a bitrate of about 10 megabytes/sec. At those bitrates, you'd only be able to hold 25,000 songs on a 1TB iPod. That would be absolutely paltry and an insult to my character. Also, in order to tell the difference between 128kbit AAC and uncompressed music with headphones, they need to include $400 headphones with the 1 TB iPod as well. I'm going to rate this story a double negative!

 

[fabianjj]

Am I the only one who's still using an 80Gb IDE drive for my pc? I know I should've upgraded a long time ago, but 80 is about all I need(although many others definately need more than that).

But on the other hand I have to burn dozens of DVDs every month

 

[MacsAttack]

WOW... although totally un-necessary that would be awesome!

I DARE someone to fill up a 4TB drive.

Of course thats what used to be said about 4gb drives too

I could use 4 of these right now. OK - two of them would be mirrored as my Time Machine backup volume, but that still gives me my system and scratch disks...

The natural state of any hard disk is full.

 

[MaskedPhantom]

The ultimate iPod.

 

[Diatribe]

The natural state of any hard disk is full.

So true!

I wouldn't mind a bigger full disk though.

 

[SiliconAddict]

Yes and Apple will be up to a staggering 18GB of flash in their iPod Touch Advanced. Can someone PLEASE slap some sense into these people and have them put REAL storage into their touch along with a larger cache? Please?

 

[Data]

Combination in laptops would be the best imho

Like sombody possted before, flash for the OS and main software, and hdd for the rest in a lap top would be the way to go i think, and i even tought there were plans oin that direction by Apple.

 

[Diatribe]

Yes and Apple will be up to a staggering 18GB of flash in their iPod Touch Advanced.

Well the days of regular HDs in iPods are gone anyway, this is only interesting for laptops and desktops.
Hopefully they'll be at 64GB end of next year.

 

[0098386]

Dammit, first Flash comes along with it's less delicate hardware, then in the other corner disk drives leap up this much.

I see the rift won't be vanishing any time soon?

 

[santaliqueur]

My point is, haven't we advanced in technology to get rid of that, all that extra crap and is stored on our hard drives?

I'm not sure if you understand. All the 'extra crap' on your hard drive is independent of its size. If you are complaining about how a hard drive's advertised size is more than what you actually get, this is nothing new. There is no "technology" that we can advance in order to correct this. Manufacturers use decimal units to advertise hard drive space, but computers use hard drive space in binary units. This leads to them exaggerating the size of a hard drive. They claim 1 GB = 1 billion bytes, but it's a little more than that. They put it all in the fine print, and it's a tricky practice.

 

[MacinDoc]

To me, the storage size isn't even the most important advancement we will see as a result of this discovery. If data is compressed to take only 25% of the space on a platter, that means that reading and writing of contiguous data from/to the platter will be 4 times the current speed, even at the same drive speed in RPM. This could significantly improve one of the largest current bottlenecks in computer speed: HD read/write. Laptop drives based on this technology could significantly outperform the best current desktop drives, with no need for increased power utilization. The only problem is that current data transfer speeds could be too slow, and new interfaces might need to be developed (although I don't know if SATA II has a high enough data transfer rate).

 

[SactoGuy18]

While breaking 1024 GB hard disk capacity barrier is great, the big problem is the system BIOS for current computers might not be able to find more than 1024 GB of hard disk storage capacity. That's actually not an issue for MacOS X and Windows XP/Vista, both of which are capable of handling multi-terabyte hard drives.

 

[sachamun]

Get Perpendicular

I know I post this all the time, but it's relevant, and it's a must see...
http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/research/recording_head/pr/PerpendicularAnimation.html

 

[Diatribe]

I know I post this all the time, but it's relevant, and it's a must see...
http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/research/recording_head/pr/PerpendicularAnimation.html

Hehe I love this video. Pure genius. Thanks for posting it again.

 

[Digital Skunk]

All kidding aside...how many different "main" manufactures of hard drives are out there? There seems to be several dozen, but they are probably using someone else's technology. Anyone know this?

Actual HDD manufacturers... I think there is about fiver:
(1) Western Digital
(2) Samsung
(3) Hitachi (which bought IBMs division)
(4) Seagate
(5) Maxtor (I think... I could be wrong on this one. If isn't the top four I don't really trust them)

I don't know if there are any other actual hard disk drive manufacturers out there.

 

[kebuttke]

cheapskates

i think the reason why they havent put more emphasis on the flash memory is that the HDD companies want to exhaust all the loot from the HDD's as they can, then move on to the next thing. if they make flash cheap, it wipes out any r&d return they would get. i gaurantee they can make flash cheap, just too greedy, but i guess that capitalism for ya. again, thats just my theory.

 

[winterspan]

HD pr0n

that will give y'all enough space to do nothing but DL'ing and watching pr0n for rest of your life.

Yes, but HD 1080P is NOT GOOD ENOUGH. Just think with all that space in the next few years, and if the pr0n producers upgrade to 4K digital cinema (4096x2048), we'll have SUPER HI-DF pr0n! Gives a new meaning to "in your face". You'll actually be able to SEE the gonorrhea! WOW!

 

[winterspan]

Never say DARE with technology evolution

WOW... although totally un-necessary that would be awesome!

I DARE someone to fill up a 4TB drive.

Of course thats what used to be said about 4gb drives too

1) Lossless Music
2) Lossless 5.1 channel surround Music (live concerts, etc)
3) 1000's of pics.. everyone will have 20 Mpixel cameras that also do HD video recording
4) whole seasons of HD 720P/1080P episodes ripped from OTA broadcast TV.
5) 1080P/7.1 channel Lossless HD movies (bluray, HDDVD or otherwise)

eventually 4K digital cinema (4096x2048 or 4x the size of 1080P) will be the norm in theaters and then they'll have new 4K HDTVs and 4K "ultra-violet-ray players"

I still remember buying $100-$150 256MB cards for mp3 players. Now you can buy a 16GB SD card for the same price and 32GB/64GB is right around the corner.

 

[winterspan]

I dunno, I was actually hoping for less fanfare and efforts into the hard disk drive arena and more development and excitement in the solid state disk arena.
I thought that standard hard drives would be declining in technological development over the next 4-8 years with an increase in technological upgrades in flash and other drives.

Standard HDD marketshare/development probably will be declining in the next 4-8 years. But to say you were hoping for "more excitement in solid state tech"?
I think theres A TON of excitement in that arena. Cost aside, they have nearly CAUGHT UP to HDD! You can already buy a 128GB 2.5" drive and 256GB are just around the corner. Whats the latest 2.5" HDD you can buy? 250GB? just wait till the price per GB ratio falls to 1/5 and we'll be there!

 

[winterspan]

I'll be more impressed when they will give us 4TB formatted space rather than calling it a 4TB disk drive and having it be far less than they advertise. I'd love to see the industry own up to their deceit of consumers. If a car manufacturer claimed that a car got 45 miles per gallon and the actual driver couldn't get better than 30, there'd be a class action lawsuit on their hands. We just bend over and take it from the companies.

Perhaps they could make it even more fun and call it a 5TB drive. Why not a 6TB? If they can lie about the current disks being nowhere near what they label them as, you know it's only going to get worse. I could care less about their theories about size. I think it ought to be labeled ACTUAL USABLE SPACE AVAILABLE.

Its not deception when they list it in the fine-print But seriously they advertise the size as unformatted Gigabytes where people just assume that a REAL gigabyte (1000^3 bytes) is the same as a gibibyte (1024^3).
So you actually get about 7.5GB less per 100GB of the drive when you take the Gigabyte vs Gibibyte thing into account, plus the space you lose to the formatting/file system overhead)

 

[winterspan]

This is great but at what cost? Will these drives be as reliable? It seems you can only make things so small before the drives would fail...

"It seems you can only make things so small before the drives would fail" ?
thats a bit of a generalization, although yes you run into new problems when going down into the low double digit nanometers... I'm sure just as they come up with new breakthroughs in R&D to boost capacity, they'll keep finding ways to make them more reliable..

 

[sushi]

wow thats alot of stuff. i think we need blu ray or hd dvds so we can sort of back up to that media if we choose to. dvds are just too small these days

Current HD-DVD stores about 30GBs.

So it would take about 130 of them to back up a 4T HD. Not a good solution.

Looks like external HDs are the way to go. And you would need to use FW800 or SATA2. I would hate to use USB 2. That would take forever!

With drives of this size, backing up via Time machine or whatever method is going to become even more paramount.

Losing several GBs of priceless data sucks as it is, but can you imagine havign an almost-full 4 TB hard drive fail on you?

Good point.

How many don't back up now because it is inconvenient. As the drives get bigger, it will only become more inconvenient due to the time it takes.

Reading your reply gave me something of an ‘aha’ experience. ‘T was somewhere in 1993 or so, and I was very proud of my 40 MB harddrive. I even ‘doubled’ the capacity with a program called Stacker. Perhaps the really old among you still remember. The fact that I do says enough.

I remember the pre-HD days where everything ran from floppy discs.

A 40MB HD was a luxury item back then.

The bigger your drive is, the more you'll find to fill it up.

80 gigs used to be enough, now 500 gig just won't cut it.

Yep, the goldfish theory where one expands to their surroundings.

I know I post this all the time, but it's relevant, and it's a must see...
http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/research/recording_head/pr/PerpendicularAnimation.html

Always fun to watch again. Good little flick.