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.

[gatorgriz]

LOL... Your comment clearly ends this thread... Concise; you bet; I'm still laughing.

What a great response!

[SauronOfMordor]

There isn't 6500 hours of music in existance that's worth listening to. I haven't found more than a couple hundred hours of music that's worth listening to (others tastes may vary)

Now, the ability to store many hours of DVD-quality video, THAT's interesting, and should have hollywood peeing their pants, because that will facilitate people being easily able to swap movies

[annyokie]

Thanks! I aim to amuse!

[Turbo Pig]

but also potentially turn us into paranoid stepford people in public.

We don't need technology to make that happen. Look at the PC atmosphere in most places nowadays.

[Bonaparte]

"...will create a lack of privacy that will lower crime..."

The bad guys will see its potential too. I guess it will even out over certain categories of crime.

[twntaipan]

Use Linux and forget defrag.

[old-ager]

> A Moore's law definitely doesn't apply to this technology.

Hmmm. I recall buying a 25 MHz 386 with 8 MB of RAM and a 150 MB hard drive. All of these components were pretty well matched. The hard drive was $1500.

Now, multiply the 150 MB by 1000. That's 150 GB. You can buy that for $75 now. Multiplying the 25 MHz by 1000, we have 25,000 MHz = about 25 GHz. But a garden-variety PC processor is about 2.5 GHz, not 25.

Multiplying the 8 MB RAM by 1000, we get 8,000 MB or about 8 GB. Not too many 2.5 GHz processors are paired with 8 G of RAM.

So hard disks have progressed faster than other components, not slower.

[FreedomCalls]

I think it's LaCie that's had a 500 Gig out for over a year now. I got 2-250's last December for well under $1.00 per Gig.

Actually, LaCie has had a 1 TeraByte (1000 GB!) hard drive out for a few months.

[kylaka]

Thanks for the link to LaCie's 1 Tera. The Specs don't say how many platters it has, but with a 5-1/4 form factor and 11 pounds of weight, and at $1.20 cost per GB, I do wonder. I'd hate to have one of those suckers fail.

[FreedomCalls]

The Specs don't say how many platters it has

It has four 250GB platters.

[DentsRun]

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

I remember seriously thinking about paying $1000 for a 5 meg drive for my Epson CP/M machine back in the mid-eighties. I would have too except it was no faster than my twin floppies.

[stylin19a]

one unit; 1 terabyte; ships early April; 1200 bucks.

[roadcat]

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)

Showing our age, aren't we? I remember my boss getting pissed when I bought a 20-meg drive for $500 and it was far cheaper than what he paid for his 5-meg drive.

[roadcat]

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.

When I bought my Apple-II in 1977 there were no hard drives or floppies. The operating system loaded from an audio tape cassette. Technology gets cheaper and better as time goes by. I expanded the 4kb (kilo, not mega) memory by buying 16kb ram for $500. Recently I bought 1gb memory for my pc for under $100. I've been wanting to expand the memory for my digital camera, and now I find that I can get a 4gb microdrive for under $250 (by gutting an Apple iPod or CL Muvo mp3 player).

[Nick Danger]

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

Yes. In the case of the "DeathStars," the problem was that the drive had been spec'd to run 7 hours per day. IBM considered these "consumer-grade" drives. Well, many consumers run their machines 24/7 now... I have 3 doing that.

The heads in the DeskStars run so close to the platter that friction with the air is an issue. If the drive was left on too long, but idle, the air between the head and the platter would gradually heat up. That would case the platter to expand in the vicinity of the head. Cue the scraping noise.

There is a firmware fix for this now. All it does is move the heads every once in a while when the drive is idle. This prevents any one area of the platter from getting warm enough to expand and scrape the head.

Anyone who has an IBM DeskStar drive should get the firmware update. Your drive will fail without it. I lost two of these puppies before I found out it was a known problem with a fix.

[null and void]

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

Which is precisely why we are developing new materials...

[antiRepublicrat]

Actually, LaCie has had a 1 TeraByte (1000 GB!) hard drive out for a few months.

Likely four 250GB drives in a RAID 0, still pretty cool, but that's a lot of eggs in one basket. I think I'll set up a RAID 5 in a spare box.

[Tribune7]

No, it was on 800 KB floppies (at least w/the Mac Plus.) In fact, the external disk drive was coveted periphial.

[antiRepublicrat]

No, it was on 800 KB floppies

I was thinking of the original Mac. I'm still amazed how fast my old Atari 1040ST boots up since the OS is on ROMS.

[roadcat]

I was thinking of the original Mac. I'm still amazed how fast my old Atari 1040ST boots up since the OS is on ROMS.

A common trick on machines in the old days was to burn your own OS on EPROMS. I used to do that with my old Apple II, Mac, and PC's. Nothing like having the OS up and running in 2 to 5 seconds. And customizing it with your own utilities.