Bought a new hard drive yesterday.
 

It's for the media server PC where I store all my downloaded movies and TV shows. $150. Pretty standard stuff.

http://img37.imagefra.me/img/img37/1...vm_7f00eb4.jpg

http://img39.imagefra.me/img/img39/1...wm_d5ec02b.gif

Seems like it was only fifteen or twenty years ago that we were using the prefix "giga" in a humorous context, as though a gigabyte were some unthinkably massive quantity of data. At the time, I had six hard drives in my PC (a combination of SCSI and IDE), two of which were full-height 5.25", to give me something like 500 megs of total storage. Or put another way, 0.0005 TB. It was tits. I had more .MOD files than most BBSs.

(Of course, back then a megabyte was 1024 KB. We're at a point now where a few billion bytes is just a rounding error. But who's counting?)

Any wagers on when the first 1 PB hard drive will show up?

damn 150 bucks for 2 terabytes!
its amazing how much prices are coming down, and capability is coming up.

want level: extreme.

Where did you buy? That's a great price!

I just got one of these in a 2TB version: Buffalo Technology - Products - LinkStation Pro Duo™

I plugged it into my router and can access it from all my computers or any pc with an internet connection. I have it set up in RAID1 configuration so I really only have 1TB of storage, but should one of the HDs go out I have a mirrored backup at all times. I can also network any printer to it or add more space using the 2 USB ports on the back.

It was $289 shipped from amazon.

Single drive PB isn't going to happen on a HDD platter. In fact even though a 2TB drive seems monstrous, HDDs are one of the slowest progressing parts of a pc technology wise. Both in capacity and speed. The future will be in something with non-moving parts.

Im holding out for quantum computers

Got it from NewEgg: Newegg.com - HITACHI Deskstar 0F10311 2TB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive -Bare Drive

It's not the cheapest 2TB drive out there- both Seagate and WD have 2TB units for $140. But I've been having nothing but wonderful experiences with IBM / HGST since I bought a 10 gig DeskStar many years ago, so why change?

Agreed, I wasn't sure we'd ever reach this point. But Moore's Law seems to apply to hard drives as well, and there's no indication that the pace is slowing.


Well, yes and no.

I agree that for laptops, we're probably in the terminal stage of magnetic storage. Lower power consumption, less heat, better shock resistance. And SSDs are starting to get big and cheap. At least in relative terms. But for desktop and server applications, I think that platters have a lot of life left in 'em.

For one, there's still a staggering price gap. The $150 I spent would only get me 32-64 GB worth of SSD. That's thirty to sixty times more expensive per unit capacity, and those are the uber-cheap ones. The big-name SSDs in that price range are 16 GB. And I really don't have room in my little mini-ATX case for sixty SSDs. And a 128 GB SSD is not twice as expensive as a 64 GB device. More like 3x to 4x. They're still following the CPU pricing scheme. By comparison, a 2TB hard drive is only about 1.25x to 1.5x the cost of a 1TB drive, and on down the line.

And second, there's speed. Yeah, SSDs have incredibly fast read times. But their write times are still pretty lethargic. This is an architectural problem. With any storage device, before you can do a write, you have to do an erase. No big deal with a hard drive. But SSDs require that erase cycles happen in relative large blocks, several megabytes in most cases. So if you want to write a few k of data to the device, the controller first has to read a whole block into memory, then erase the block, then re-write the block with the new data added in. As a result, the overall performance of an SSD in a typical application tends to be many times slower than a hard disk.

We'll get there eventually, I'm sure. Just not soon.

I bought that same one from newegg last week for 159 instead but with a $30 mail in rebate.

It's going into my Windows Home Server which is at 2.29tb right now. I had a media server with a bunch of drives but decided to get Home Server for some redundancy. Works great so far and I can even stream directly from it which I didn't expect with an Atom in it.

SSD tech is changing very rapidly. Much faster than platter tech. Look into NAND stacking and more specifically Intel's recent breakthrough in phase change memory. Intel touts NAND-killer breakthrough ? The Register

Also, a block in flash memory is never as large as MB. If you into it you will find that usually a Block is 64-256KB and made up of Pages that are 512B-2KB. I have not yet seen or used a flash that can't do Page level operations.

For HDD SSD's they have gotten a bad rep for a long time for their speed. The issue largely was because they were all using a siliconimage controller chip that was never designed for the application in the first place. Now the "high end" ones are using a purpose built controller and are achieving write speeds at or better than the best HDDs and read speeds that can nearly saturate the SATA bus when being read sequentially.

I'm still hoping that the hard drive will go away. I hate them. They're the slowest part of a computer and the most unreliable. If the first PB media is a hard drive, I'm gonna be pissed. SSDs are a start. I still drool over the PCIe 1TB SSD. If it wasn't thousands of dollars, I'd buy it.

So Joe, did you mean to misspell "yesterday" or what?:giggle:

Here's a nice graphic on how media storage has evolved (via Giz):
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2685/...890b100e_b.jpg

I never realized an eight-track was named as such b/c it held 8 tracks. LoL

Chris

I wouldn't expect to see PB in any consumer form for at least another 15-20 years.

HDD's are getting crazy cheap and large capacity. Picked up my 1TB external WD for $100 about 4 months ago.

Damn pesky mods always changing people's thread titles and avatars...


Agreed. And it will continue rapidly to evolve in size, speed, reliability, etc. I just think that in higher-end applications, the platter will be around for a while. Just look at how long it took for hard drives to become standard in home PCs, displacing tape and floppies. About 10 years. And hard drives had been around in "big" computers for 30 years before that.

"As Flash SSDs have gotten faster and larger, erase blocks have grown as well. Flash erase blocks used to be 16K in length. Now they are 1 Megabyte for small SSDs extending up to as large as 4 Megabytes for some models."

Source: http://managedflash.com/news/papers/...rmance-art.pdf

I've been following SSD technology semi-closely, mostly because I intend to replace the HD in my laptop with one just as soon as they are fast / cheap / reliable enough. I haven't seen any benchmarks as yet that lead me to believe this is the case. The problem, for me, is that I use my laptop to run a couple of big database applications which are hugely write-intensive. They're slow enough as it is, without my adding further bottlenecks.



Agreed, I don't much care for them. There's an old saw (from the early 90s) that goes something to the effect that hard drives used to be slow, expensive and unreliable, but today, they are fast, cheap and unreliable. :D

But, to paraphrase a political joke, hard drives are the worst mainstream storage technology currently available, except for all the other ones.


Maybe.

I think that the technology to make it happen will be available. I mean, consumer-grade hard drives went from 100 megs to 1 gig in about 5 years, from 1 gig to 100 gig in another 5, and from 100 gig to 1 TB (ter?) in roughly 6. And all the while, they've gotten smaller and contained fewer platters. The actual increase in storage density (bytes / cm2) has grown much faster than that.

OTOH, I'm not sure if there will be a demand for it. We're now at the point where I can store more HD video on a drive than I can watch in several months. Perhaps if a technology (by which I mean more of a legal and contractual evolution than hardware) comes along which makes the concept of going to the store and buying (or renting) a physical thing with a movie on it totally obsolete, then it'll become necessary to have PB-level storage. Microsoft and Netflix are making good strides in that direction, but critical mass is still a way off.

:fawk:
So that was you?

I think demand not technology will be the reason for the slow down. I just can't see consumer users needing 1PB or more within 15 years. With high def video he need for more storage increased pretty rapidly, but I don't see audio or any other formats getting much more dense in that time frame. Can you even imagine needing 1000TB for your home computer? I feel like I have a pretty damn large need of space and I can't even manage to fill my 1TB external storage drive. Like I said, I don't see audio getting much more dense, nor for image formats, maybe video will take another few leaps in that time, but surely not on that scale.

I also don't see any current storage technology capable of it. I know it will be along one day in the near future. Either way, I give it at least 15 years, if not quite a bit more before you start seeing 1PB-2PB drives like you are currently seeing TB. Then again, I also think the next 15 years will be very interesting times for technology. Computers may not even exist like they do today.

Is the "Deskstar" still considered the "Deathstar" in terms of reliability?

Funny, IBM would have called you crazy if you thought every person in the world would have a "Personal Computer" 20 years ago. They also shot down the "mouse", who would ever use a device called a mouse. Go figure...

The fact of the matter is that as storage, both ram and hdd, increases in size the programs that run on them will be created larger and larger in size to provide more functionality.

I had both my 30gig Deskstars shit the bed on the same box a couple of months apart. Second disk failed JUST after the first disk was replaced on RMA. I was not pleased. Last time I ran a RAID0 configuration.

I agree, but I just don't think it will be on the PB scale within 15 years. I could be wrong though, technology does grow fairly exponentially. 15 year growth from 15 years ago could be more like 5 years to us now. Never know. With a lot of other computer technology, things have seemed to have slowed down a bit. Things were on a very quick pace in the early 2000's but in the last 5 years I think it has kind of hit a wall. There will be a large technological breakthrough that will boost it, like always happens every 10 years or so. Very well may see PB storage within that time, I just don't think the need will arise. With more complex programs that require more space, you also get programs that require less space for the same amount of functionality.

:giggle:

I don't think it's likely that the bitrate of "high quality" video is going to increase dramatically in the foreseeable future. H264 is already > DVD quality, and IMO approaches BluRay.

What I think may change is how the average consumer collects and stores their video media.

For the past 30+ years, we've had home video in some form or another; be it Betamax, Laserdisc, VHS, DVD, etc. The quality has gotten better and the media has gotten smaller. But what hasn't changed is that each movie has been contained within a unique physical device that you slip a cover over and store on the bookshelf.

I occasionally hear people speculate as to what will come after BluRay, and my answer is, most likely, nothing at all. I don't mean that BluRay will live forever. Far from it, I see it as a stopgap technology that will die in the near future. What I mean is a paradigm shift. The next big thing in home video won't involve going to a store and bringing home a physical object, having an object delivered to you by mail, or even getting an object out of a vending machine at the local supermarket.

In the next wave, you'll simply push a button and the movie will appear.

You might say that we're already there, what with video on demand and such, but to me that's a parallel technology, not a competing one. People buy DVDs rather than only renting them because they want to have the media available for use whenever they want it, and without recurring costs. Hell, my niece has probably watched every single Dora / Spongebob / Disney Princess DVD in the house at least a hundred times each. That sort of thing requires ownership (or at least, indefinite possession) of the media in question, it's not the sort of thing that PPV / VOD will address. We're finally at a point where genuinely high-speed internet access is being taken for granted in most households, and where common consumer-grade devices (like my Xbox 360) support the concept of being able to play media from a hard disk onto the TV without being a computer geek.

And that is what will drive the push for PB-grade consumer storage.

It's just a question of when.


Maybe 10. Probably less. Assuming that the 3.5" form-factor does not become obsolete, and assuming that aerial density continues to increase at its historical rate, we'll get there sooner than you think.


Now that is a very interesting observation. Care to expound? I mean, are we talking about the physical hardware (a box with wires coming out of the back) or the whole paradigm of a monitor, mouse and keyboard?



Funny, that. Seems like every manufacturer has had a bad run at some point or another.

I owned a 75GXP, which was the specific model that inspired that moniker. The interesting thing is that mine developed the click while it was still in the warranty period, except I was too damn lazy to ever do anything about it. I moved the drive from primary to secondary service (I was doing a fair bit of video editing at the time, so I used it as my render disk) and the damn thing just never got around to actually failing. It ran for several more years until I finally retired the whole computer.

Apart from that one model though, they've been great. So far as I can remember, IBM was the first company to institute a standard 3 year warranty. And they've been at the cutting edge of storage for as long as the name has existed. I've owned at least six IBM / HGST drives over the past ten years, and never had a single loss-of-data incident.

'Course, hard drives in general are a hell of a lot better than they used to be.


Processor speed certainly has. Damn physics...

OTOH, processor capacity (complexity of core, cores per die, throughput, etc) has continued to march on. So has RAM. I doubt we'll see too many drives spinning at 30,000 RPM in the near future, but I certainly expect their capacity to continue to grow.

:dunno: Your guess is as good as mine. I think maybe a little of both. I can't see the keyboard and mouse setup lasting much longer, nor the typical computer layout of sitting at a desk behind a monitor. I think it will be more of an integrated home theater system where you can do everything from your couch or borg alcove :giggle:

I also think in the near future you will see computing technology take a more biological turn. Not saying they will be living tissue, but maybe will be modeled more closely to biology, like the human brain. Maybe information will no longer be measurable on a scale like we currently use. Technology always seems to find a way to take the most mind boggling turn possible, so who is to really say what it will be 15 years from now.

But on a less sci-fi note, I agree on your point about video on demand and things being more digitally stored than hard copies, but much like how the high def TV's took many years to catch on, and many people still don't have them, I don't see something that revolutionary being the majority by 15 years from now.

I don't think platter technology will be around much longer at all. SSD is probably what will become the standard of the next 10 years, or something similar in design. Why make a storage device with many moving parts when you can have something as simple and reliable as solid state.

Actually, I change my mind on the 15 year thing. Now that I am actually sitting here thinking of how long 15 years actually is, I do think it is very possible. Especially with the exponential rate at which technology advances. I mean shit, 15 years ago was 1995 lol. I barely even had a computer at that point. For some reason just saying 15 years didn't sound like that long to me before. The rest of my shit stands though, just on maybe a 10 year scale instead. Time flies when you are bored to death.

Damn it! Someone reply to this! :giggle: This is a topic that interests me, I like theoretical stuff and future technology. I demand someone continue this topic for my entertainment!