Seagate first with 1.5TB hard drives

The Register (UK) ^ | Thursday 10th July 2008 22:28 GMT | Austin Modine

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

One terabyte hard drives still cramping your decadent data storage lifestyle? No more tears. Seagate is rolling out 1.5TB HDDs this August.

Seagate's 1.5TB Barracuda 7200.11 will use four platters to cram the scale-tipping new raw capacity into an eleventh generation of its flagship drive. The storage firm points out its the single largest hard drive capacity bump in the last 50 years.

As the name suggests, the HDD spins at 7,200RPM. The 3Gb/s SATA I interface has a sustained data rate of up to 120MB/s.

1.5TB = this image x 119,434,242

The disks are also sold in 1TB, 750GB, 640GB, 500GB, 320GB, and 160GB varieties with cache options of 32MB and 16MB.

Yesterday, Hitachi rolled out its second generation of 1TB hard drives, using three platters of 375GB each. A bit of basic arithmetic then suggests both Hitachi and Seagate are dealing with platters of roughly the same density.

Hard drive manufacturers absolutely adore keeping pricing details mum until zero hour, and this case is no different. Expect some damage to the billfold, but the upshot is the price of 1TB HDDs may drop as a result.

Seagate also announced a new pair of 500GB hard drives for notebooks. The 2.5-inch Momentus drives will be offered in 5,400RPM and 7,200RPM variations, with 8MB of cache and 16MB of cache respectively.

The drives are offered with a free-fall sensor technology that helps prevent damage when dropped. According to Seagate, the sensor detects any changes in acceleration equal to the force of gravity and parks the heads off the disk to prevent contact with the platter in a free fall of as little as 8 inches and within 3/10ths of a second.

Momentus 5400.6 and 7200.4 hard drives will begin shipping in the fourth quarter of 2008.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Sansung just announced a 128 G Solid State Device....

[bill1952]

Um hmm.

How long to error check and defrag that drive? ;^)

[Steely Tom]

I remember when a quad NOR gate chip (i.e. 2 bits of storage) was $87 in the Newark catalog.

[bill1952]

At 4 grand a pop.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

From the Register:

Samsung fires up 128GB SSD massive attack

****************************EXCERPT*************************

'More attractive' pricing on the way

By Austin Modine

P ublished Wednesday 9th July 2008 22:15 GMT

Samsung has the factory hamster wheels oiled and has started mass-production of 128GB solid-state hard drives.

The company usually says nothing about the price of its new products, and it's sticking to that line today. However, Samsung promises the production ramp will be accompanied by "more attractive pricing" for the latest set of solid-state drives (SSDs).

Of course, attraction is a notoriously held property of I. B. Holder, so let speculation commence. A Samsung spokesman told El Reg the drives would be of "greater interest than past SSD offerings", but wouldn't go further than that.

The drives are available in 1.8in and 2.5in versions in either 128GB or 64GB raw capacities. They're based on multi-level cell technology (MLC), the slower, less energy-efficient cousin of single-level cell (SLC) drives — but less expensive to make.

Samsung says the SSDs have a write speed of 70MB/s and read speeds of 90MB/s. Certainly not the fastest SSDs out there - or hard drives, for that matter - but good enough for most.

Notably, the company claims its drives will outlive even the customer. It states the new 128GB SSDs will last "approximately 20 times longer than the generally accepted 4-5 year life span of a notebook PC hard drive". That's 80-100 years before it kicks.

Samsung said the 128GB drives consist of 64 MLC NAND flash memory chips of 16Gb each. They only burn 0.2W in standby mode and 0.5W in active mode.

The company expects sales of SSD units to increase 800 per cent between now and 2010. The next dot on their roadmap is to begin producing a 256GB consumer SSD by the end of this year. ®

[duckman]

Long way from the IBM 1301 storage unit. I must be showing my age.

[mkjessup]

This may sound like a fantastic advance in technology but as I see it, using increasingly larger and larger hard drives means that you run the risk of losing even greater amounts of data should you suffer a catastrophic failure of that drive.

Some will say "that's why you should back up your data frequently" and that's all well and good, but you can be sure that at some point, someone will say "I don't have time to back up 1.5 TB of data! It'll be ok!" and that is just the time that something unexpected will happen causing a head crash, lightning strike, power surge, you name it, and it will be bye-bye data.

I prefer 'distributed storage' which is nothing more than using multiple drives. On my system, I have (2) 160GB/SATA drives, one is the boot drive (which has plenty of room for storing data of course), the other drive is for long term archived data. In addition, I have an older IDE/RAID card which can handle up to four additional hard drives. On that card I have (4) older IDE drives of 80GB each, allowing me plenty of redundancy.

I might lose a drive at some point, but I won't lose ALL of my data at the same moment. I know this approach might not work for everybody, but it works for me.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

See #6...and Newegg.for :

SUPER TALENT FSD28GC25M 2.5" 128GB SATA Internal Solid state disk (SSD) - Retail $3,049.00

[Age of Reason]

I’m more interested in speed than I am in size.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

I just got one of these :

Rosewill R2-RAID Dual 3.5" SATA 3G HDD 2-Bay RAID 0/1/BIG/JBOD/SAFE33/SAFE55 System/ USB2.0 & eSATA Output Design -

[aft_lizard]

When they hit the $1 to 1GB ratio AND have speeds meeting or exceeding SATA HDD’s I will get a couple of SSD’s for my laptop, until then I will let the early adopters enjoy the overpriced things.

[Focault's Pendulum]

Um hmm. How long to error check and defrag that drive? ;^)

About 3 years.

Running system restore should take 2.

[MediaMole]

I use software (NTI Shadow) to automatically mirror my important data to an external drive. That keeps the photos, financial stuff, etc backed up.

Really important stuff is also backed up online using Jungledisk.

Good software can keep disks backed up with relatively little overhead. Once the initial backup is done, only changed data is archived.

Eventually, every drive will fail. Automatic backup and possibly a redundant RAID setup are your only defenses.

[rawhide]

7200rpm, seems kind of slow. I’m working with 15k drives in my computers.

[wardaddy]

I’m more interested in speed than I am in size.

well that's a new one...usually women say girth matters most

[Yo-Yo]

This was my first storage device:

Created in my High School "computer lab" on one of these:

(Of course, our Teletype terminals had accoustic modems operating at a blazing 300 baud!)

[Focault's Pendulum]

This was mime.

Of course if someone picked it up you"d have to reboot.

[Yo-Yo]

Nonvolatile RAM, but not very shock resistant?

[Malsua]

I’m working with 15k drives in my computers

I have those in my servers, but for my gaming rigs, I install the os on a fast 7200 and put all my games on raid 0 10k Sata Raptors.

[Prov1322]

When I tell people about what the acoustic modem coupler system was...and connected to an IBM Selectric typewriter (we had no video screens...) they think I’m kidding. That was the Computer Lab at Glassboro State College in 1973...

[HawaiianGecko]

You haven't really written code until you've wired a payroll system on this.

[norraad]

when it comes out on an SD card I’ll be impressed

[duckman]

Yes, I remember wiring the IBM 514, 528 and 407, unit record machines, face down, nine edge in for the punched cards.

[ShadowAce]

[Mr_Moonlight]

[jwparkerjr]

Do you remember why one of the early hard drives was named “Winchester”?

It's probably an urban legend but I understood it was because it had 30 megs of fixed and 30 megs of removeable storage and they shortened 30-30 to Winchester.

Legend or not, it makes sense.

[jwparkerjr]

re: losing even greater amounts of data should you suffer a catastrophic failure of that drive.

I don't think you can say that too often or over emphasize it!

I am a pro freelance photographer and learned long ago to stick with 1 gig compact flash cards. If you lose one, or it dies, at least you still have the rest of your assignment. Nothing makes you feel as sick to your stomach as getting back to the newsroom and finding out your drive won't load or read, or you've dropped it somewhere along the way!

Early on we had photographers who were new to digital that managed to format or erase entire assignments. Bummer. We finally found a program that would let us retrieve the files in most every instance. I still have that little program on my laptop.

[shorty_harris]

Heh, heh, paper tape...I remember feeding the tape into the computer (HP-1000?), and as it read it, having it fly out into a big, jumbled heap on the floor. Then you had to find the battery operated rewinder to put it back into a nice coil again.

[Yo-Yo]

If you switched to a pen, you’d have a WORM drive!

[Tainan]

I need a 500GB hard drive for my notebook...really...now if I can just convince the wife...and @7200rpm with 16MB of cache...yep...I need that one.

[bill1952]

I remember using that at the Bell Labs/Western Electric in 1973 at the Allendale road factory in King of Prussia, Pa.

Made huge buckets of confetti that I used for other purposes from time to time ;^)

Seems that I remember that we had ladies who used to do nothing but input data on punch-cards, but I don't remember what that job was called.

[Tainan]

"well that's a new one...usually women say girth matters most"

Why bring bellies into this?

And as the song goes..."It ain't the meat, its the motion.."

[martin_fierro]

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[antiRepublicrat]

The Winchester thing is generally true about the relation to the guns, it was some IBM drive that’s basically the father of all modern hard drive designs. I remember hard drives with this kind of action being called Winchester drives into the 90s.

[jwparkerjr]

The Winchester referred to the kind of drive that had both fixed and replaceable storage. The fixed was down in the guts of the system, the replaceable was in the form of a large circular cartridge that sat on top of the drive. It was not a sealed system and depended on a filter to prevent dust or dirt from getting into the system and ‘crashing’ the heads. CDC made a drive called the Hawk that was five fixed and five replaceable. That five was in megabytes! The first CDC drives we got were in 1970 or so and weighed about 200 pounds each. They also had a 90 mb model but I forget what it was called. The Hawk sold for about $7,500 and the carts were something like $500 each. I still have a couple of them around here someplace.

[Flying Circus]

The Winchester is the grandfather of modern HDDs and it was indeed named for its capacity. We have one of those in a lobby where I work, we also have a RAMAC floating around too.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Assuming Wikipedia has it right.....

************************

In 1973, IBM introduced the IBM 3340 "Winchester" disk drive, the first significant commercial use of low mass and low load heads with lubricated media. All modern disk drives now use this technology and/or derivatives thereof. Project head designer/lead designer Kenneth Haughton named it after the Winchester 30-30 rifle after the developers called it the "30-30" because of it was planned to have two 30 MB spindles; however, the actual product shipped with two spindles for data modules of either 35 MB or 70 MB^[3].

[antiRepublicrat]

You know jargon isn’t accurate. People still referred to PC hard drives as “Winchester” for years after that IBM drive was built.

[clamper1797]

I had one of these ...

[AppyPappy]

Winchester made the drives

[AppyPappy]

Keypunchers

[bill1952]

I remember TI.
And Radio Shack’s Tandy - Even Atari had one along with Commodore.

Remember the Commodore 64?

[hedgetrimmer]

Neat! More space for my stuff!

[N3WBI3]

why would you have do defr.... Ohhh you would use it for windows ;)

[martin_fierro]

My first storage device.

My last storage device.

[SunkenCiv]

Last year (right about now) I saw my first terabyte drive, at Staples, for about $400 (didn’t buy it). Over the weekend I bought a 500gb drive at BB for $105. Both are external drives, but the one I have is USB 2.0, FW400, and ESata. There’s another model from WD with the same capacity (but pkgd in a red box) that has FW800 as well.

[Mr_Moonlight]

Hahahahahaa ... OK, pretty good one ... but if yer gonna get technical about it, I think that we can all safely state that *THIS* was our first data storage device:

(well, without the Lego colors anyway ...... :)

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Current prices on ! Terabyte Hard Drives at Newegg:

Capacity : 800GB and higher

[Dacula]

Can you add me to the Tech Ping?