Hitachi Makes 400-Gigabyte Hard Drive

Associated Press ^ | March 13, 2004 | May Wong

[AntiGuv]

SAN JOSE, Calif. - Digital media hogs can celebrate. A new, whopping 400-gigabyte hard drive from Hitachi Global Storage Technologies can store up to 400 hours of standard television programming, 45 hours of high-definition programming or more than 6,500 hours of digital music.

Previously, the largest such drive available was a 300-gigabyte product from Maxtor Corp., said Dave Reinsel, industry analyst at IDC.

San Jose-based Hitachi said it designed the monster drive, the Deskstar 7K400, for audio/video products such as digital video recorders.

Yankee Group, a Boston-based research firm, predicts the number of households with DVRs will increase to nearly 25 million by 2007, from about 3 million today.

[oceanview]

that's why IBM sold their disk drive business.

still, the use of disk drives in PVRs (Tivo, etc) is skyrocketing.

[Hildy]

Does anyone remember the first Mac? IT HAD NO HARD DRIVE. Everytime you wanted to do something, you had to insert the FLOPPY DISK which housed the ENTIRE operating system. Yikes, it was the mid 1980's.

[AntiGuv]

Yep! I had one of those primitive devices and was immensely fond of it. LOL!

[Dark Knight]

You are, of course, right. At least much more right than the AP reporter. I am assuming you do something with Video, and you're talking about the info stream to the computers hard drive from the video source.

It sounds like they're just talking TIVO (compressed) space.

DK

[Tennessee_Bob]

Just a minute - I think I have that document on drive Z: somewhere....

[MoralSense]

Wow, I bet I could hit the ball 300 yards with that! Oh, wait. That's a driver with a 400 cc head I'm thinking of. Never mind. Wrong thread.

[kylaka]

I've still got a 486DX66 File Server running NT 4.0 with a pair of 1 Gig mirrored drives that I paid over $800 bucks each for in 1994 or so. The machine has been rebooted 2 times since assembly, due to power failures. The drives are about 1/3 full and used to store my business accounting data. The guy who set it up said it would probably be the last computer I'd need for that and he may well be right. My concern now is getting hold of a 1 gig replacemant drive, if one should fail. I shoulda bought an extra when they got down around $100 bucks in price. I never thought they'd be obsolete in ten short years.

[annyokie]

LOL Husband has nine HDs and is having kittens trying to find all his stuff after he reinstalled XP.

[supercat]

Does anyone remember the first Mac? IT HAD NO HARD DRIVE. Everytime you wanted to do something, you had to insert the FLOPPY DISK which housed the ENTIRE operating system. Yikes, it was the mid 1980's.

Did you hear about the first Mac hard drives? They connected via the floppy port so as to yield hard drive performance that was about equal to floppy drive performance.

[Boundless]

> Took 2 years to go from 360GB to 400GB. Methinks we're
> hitting the physical electromagnetic storage barrier.

Could also be:
- BIOS limits on many PCs (upgrade biz is a real issue)
- demand - the typ. new PC only "needs" 40GB or so
- demand - large server apps need performance, and high
performing drives (e.g. SCSI) are WAY behind on capacity

Until I get to the point where a single data object is
bigger than the drive, I personally prefer multiple smaller
drives to one large one.

Right now, the biggest objects I deal with are 14GB
drive-to-drive backups of some logical volumes.

Having been burned by IBM/Deskstar (and Fuji, and Maxtor,
and WesternDigital), I'm in NO hurry to put all my eggs in
one basket.

[savedbygrace]

That's anywhere from about 2.5 to 4.5 GB/hour, depending on the data rate of the MPEG-2 stream. So, AP is even wrong there.

[Servant of the 9]

I think I once paid a grand for a 60 Meg drive!

I Know I once paid 2 grand for a 5 meg drive. (Very Early 80s>

So9

[antiRepublicrat]

Everytime you wanted to do something, you had to insert the FLOPPY DISK which housed the ENTIRE operating system

The OS was on ROMs.

[Revolting cat!]

Cripes! I wish they had kept it a secret! Now that Redmond, WA company, what's its name, will surely find a way to fill it up with its bloatware. More idiotic features in WORD 2005 to come.

[Polybius]

I think I once paid a grand for a 60 Meg drive

Yeah, but it can still protect your wooden furniture from water stains from your beer bottle. :-)

[Prodigal Son]

My prediction is that many of us will have multiple cameras continuously storing video of our house, car, office, kid's school non stop. We will be creating our own biographies in a sense.

Yep. I reckon in the future, people will just record everything, all the time as a way to back up their memories.

It also has huge 'personal safety' applications. If you were recording pretty much 360 degrees around you all the time and that data were transmitted to your home hard-drive in real time, any mugging, assault, kidnapping would be recorded and the cops would have a picture of the guy from the very get-go.

Lot of wild stuff coming up in the not-so-distant future.

[HardStarboard]

>>>Methinks we're hitting the physical electromagnetic storage barrier. <<<

You may be right. However, I worked for Hitachi in the 80's (retired in 90) and their technological capability is incredible.

I was in the Hitachi Data System group in San Jose. Back then we sold both mainframes and storage systems. They are no longer selling mainframes in the US.

Hitachi had 19,000 PhD's working for them in the late 80's - more than any other company in the world. The reliability of their mainframes was 4 to 5 times that of IBM, but IBM got very aggressive on price and Hitachi evidently decided that the cost of continuing wasn't justified by the profits.

A great company.

[HardStarboard]

>>>I wonder if they figured out what made the IBM drives fail?<<<

I was with Hitachi in the early 80's when IBM was having horrific problems with their big drives. The closest thing I ever heard as a cause was the gassing off of the epoxy they used to glue several airconditioning ducts in the units. It evidently deposited microscopic particles on the disk surface and caused head crashes.

I got a lot of business for Hitachi out of that issue.

[dogbyte12]

On the negative side, everybody is going to be recording you all the time. You will literally be stored on hundreds of hard drives every day as you go about your business. Better not pick your nose in public or it could make it on a funniest home video show.

Just picture every single house you go by, filming you as you drive by, then as you pass each business, they too take your picture, the cars along your side are continuously snapping away, as you head into work, you are on camera all day.

I might find it a bit oppressive. Cheap storage will create a lack of privacy that will lower crime, but also potentially turn us into paranoid stepford people in public.

[Bonaparte]

"Woohoo!"

You and me, both! I've got 2 HD slots left in my tower. A new Hitachi is definitely gonna fill one of them! Hehehehe