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Data Storage Upgrades

Seagate Announces First 1.5TB Desktop Hard Drive 383

Posted by timothy from the they-had-to-count-them-all- dept.
MojoKid writes "Seagate announced three new consumer-level hard drives today, which it claims are the 'industry's first 1.5-terabyte desktop and half-terabyte notebook hard drives.' The company claims that it is able to greatly increase the areal density of its drive substrates by utilizing perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) technology that is capable of delivering more than triple the storage density of traditional longitudinal recording. Seagate's latest desktop-class hard drive, the Barracuda 7200.11, will be available in a 1.5TB capacity starting in August. The 3.5-inch drive is made up of four 375GB platters and has a 7,200-rpm rotational speed."
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Seagate Announces First 1.5TB Desktop Hard Drive More

Seagate Announces First 1.5TB Desktop Hard Drive

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  • that's a lot (Score:4, Funny)

    by jgarra23 ( 1109651 ) on Thursday July 10, 2008 @04:09PM (#24141831)
    of pr0n!

  • great (Score:4, Funny)

    by Adult film producer ( 866485 ) <van@i2pmail.org> on Thursday July 10, 2008 @04:09PM (#24141837)
    more storage for nerds to steal and archive the work I produced. Damn them.
    • Do people really archive that much porn? That's insane. Frankly, 500GB of porn is enough. Barely. For today.

      • Re:great (Score:5, Funny)

        by morgan_greywolf ( 835522 ) * on Thursday July 10, 2008 @04:32PM (#24142349) Homepage Journal

        Yeah. Bill Gates once said 500 GB of porn ought to be enough for anybody! Or something like that...

    • Slow drives (Score:3, Interesting)

      by dj245 ( 732906 )
      Whats really starting to become apparent is that these drives are very slow compared to the size of them. If we assume a 1500GB drive (actually smaller due to marketing) and 60 megabyte/sec transfer time (which I think may be generous), the drive takes 426 hours to copy all 1500GB. That's over a week. What will happen in another 5 years when drives are 3-4 times as large but transfer rates are only increased slightly?

      I think the way things are going, hard drives have moved and are moving into a marke

      • poor math (Score:5, Informative)

        by dj245 ( 732906 ) on Thursday July 10, 2008 @05:09PM (#24143163) Homepage
        My math is crummy today. Its 426 minutes which is over 7 hours. But still quite a long time considering.

      • Re:Slow drives (Score:4, Informative)

        by BrentH ( 1154987 ) on Thursday July 10, 2008 @05:40PM (#24143733)
        As the bits are more densly packed on the platters, the thoughput is increasing too. Current drives easily doo 100MB/s and I would be surprised if this drive can do 120-140MB/s. You're point still stands of course, HD space increases faster than throughputs increase.

        • Re:Slow drives (Score:4, Informative)

          by proxima ( 165692 ) on Thursday July 10, 2008 @08:31PM (#24145927)

          Current drives easily doo 100MB/s and I would be surprised if this drive can do 120-140MB/s.

          Got a source for that? I've just installed two Seagate SATA 750G drives with 16 MB of cache each in a mirrored config, and I get sustained read performance in the neighborhood of 60-65 MB/s. And mirroring should speed up read performance relative to a single drive. Write performance is about 25 MB/s (tested using bonnie++). These numbers are a significant improvement over the PATA 200G and 120G drives that they replaced, but not matching the relative increase in capacity (nearly 4x).

          This article [tomshardware.com] is about a year old, but none of the drives listed give you throughput greater than 100 MB/s. And that list includes 10k RPM drives.

          • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

            by proxima ( 165692 )

            This article [tomshardware.com] is about a year old, but none of the drives listed give you throughput greater than 100 MB/s. And that list includes 10k RPM drives.

            Correction: One drive of about a dozen gives 102 MB/s read performance, a WD Velociraptor which is 10k RPM.

          • Re:Slow drives (Score:5, Informative)

            by jriskin ( 132491 ) on Thursday July 10, 2008 @10:56PM (#24147393) Homepage

            Good Source is Storage Review
            http://www.storagereview.com/php/benchmark/bench_sort.php [storagereview.com]

            The top 34 drives all do at least 54mb/sec MINIMUM and at least ~80MB/sec maximum. The top 15kRPM cheetah doing 82.7-135MB/sec.

            If i were to pull a number out of my ass I would say 78-135MB/sec (min/max) on the new 1.5TB drives.

            I would say if you have 750gig seagates and you are only getting 25MB/sec you have a bottleneck. Those drives should do a MINIMUM of at least 40MB/sec...

          • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

            by Anonymous Coward

            Sounds a lot like your SATA/RAID controller may suck. I'd set up a pair of Seagate 7200.11 500GB 32MB cache drives last week with a fairly cheap Promise TX4 controller (heard about issues with the RAID supporting models available at my local computer stores). Used software mirroring (RAID 1) in Windows 2003, and did a quick HDTach test to see how they fared against the old 10K RPM 73GB SCSI U320 drives they replaced.

            Turns out that aside from a poorer average seek time (12ms vs 7ms), they beat the hell out o

      • Needs are changing (Score:4, Insightful)

        by mcrbids ( 148650 ) on Friday July 11, 2008 @02:42AM (#24148965) Journal

        As the amount of data stored grows and gets cheaper per GB, the amount of marginal data increases to fill it. It's a form of long-tail economics [wikipedia.org] - you keep more and more data worth less and less as the price of storage drops.

        When a large drive was 80 MB, I didn't keep music in my computer, and I kept a few low-rez, carefully trimmed/cropped/scaled down personal pics in the computer. When a large drive was 800 MB, I kept a few of my favorite songs as MP3s, and dozens of pictures. When a large drive was 8 GB, I had a modest collection of music and a few hundred pics, at 80 GB, I had all my CDs saved as MP3s along with thousands of pics, at 800 GB (now) I have thousands of MP3s, pics from every source I can imagine, as well as many videos from my digital camera.

        As the value of each bit goes down, the total value of the machine goes up, even as the value of each bit goes down. What's funny (for me) is that the same P3 that started with 8 GB now has almost a TB of space, and still serves all my files. Storage/bandwidth has value, processing power is not so much.

  • Obligatory... (Score:4, Funny)

    by thatskinnyguy ( 1129515 ) on Thursday July 10, 2008 @04:10PM (#24141851)
    1.5TB... Who will ever need more than that?

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by jonbryce ( 703250 )

      Me. I already have 2TB across 4 drives here.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Bomarc ( 306716 )
      For me, hard drives are a comity. I need 750GB / month to handle the recording that I do. This number went up 'recently' when I started recording in HDef. With this drive offering, I can reduce my hard drive need to once every other month -- until all broadcasts are in HDef. I've still not sure what I'm going to do with 20 copies of "Enterprise" that I've been recording on the SciFi channel though.

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by jbeaupre ( 752124 )
      It will take a while, but 1.5TB will seem like nothing. But no one will need more than 640TB. Ever.

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by Ritz_Just_Ritz ( 883997 )

      You'll need at least that much when Emacs 22.2 is released. That's supposed to boot you right into the Matrix.

  • Flash video (Score:5, Funny)

    by bigstrat2003 ( 1058574 ) * on Thursday July 10, 2008 @04:11PM (#24141879)

    For some reason, I can't stop thinking of this Flash cartoon I saw once about perpendicular hard drive recording, with cartoon dudes singing, "Get perpendicular! (Get perpendicular!)".

    ...I need a life.

  • Sounds killer! (Score:4, Funny)

    by DanWS6 ( 1248650 ) on Thursday July 10, 2008 @04:12PM (#24141903)
    I can't wait to try out ReiserFS on it.

  • Isn't their current 1TB drive only 3 platters? So this isn't really a big increase in density, just adding a platter with a slight density increase. Regardless, I'm disappointed. I was hoping they would be coming out with 2TB drives this year. At least it's coming out in August, in time for the new TV shows in the fall (I need to upgrade my MythTV). Even if I don't buy one, it will help push down the prices on the 1TB drives.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by WizADSL ( 839896 )
      Well, they ARE cramming another platter into the drive, surely they mean platter density inside the drive case.....

  • That burns up just outside of 90 days..

    • Warranty (Score:4, Informative)

      by Dracker ( 1323355 ) on Thursday July 10, 2008 @04:39PM (#24142527)
      Actually, Seagate offers a 5-year warranty on their hard drives. It's a major reason why I usually buy from Seagate instead of going to Western Digital or Samsung, which usually only a offer 3-year warranty. Still, it's always best to keep backups. How nice the company is about replacements says nothing about how likely the drive is to fail.
  • One hard drive in your case takes up less space than 166 dual layer DVDs. Realistically, you can probably fit 300-400 DVDs of data on, since so many don't use all of a single layer, let alone all a dual. Or you can pare down your 2000 CD collection.

  • yawn (Score:5, Insightful)

    by bravecanadian ( 638315 ) on Thursday July 10, 2008 @04:16PM (#24141995)
    Hard drives are getting bigger? Wow.. what news.. that hardly ever happens.
  • wow, first time I read that I read 1.5TB notebook drive....guess you read what you want to :)
  • I'm trying to recover email out of an .edb file and the file is 76 gigabytes. I need to run the recovery on a desktop and I'll need to save the .pst files to that desktop hd as well. I REALLY could use one of these RIGHT NOW!

  • What I really want... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Chordonblue ( 585047 ) on Thursday July 10, 2008 @04:19PM (#24142055) Journal

    How about a drive that advertises longevity instead of storage density. Seriously, I'd take half that storage if there was more assurance of my data integrity.

    Losing an 80 GB HD nearly broke my heart, I can't imagine what losing 1.5 TB would do...

    • Re:What I really want... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by bigstrat2003 ( 1058574 ) * on Thursday July 10, 2008 @04:22PM (#24142121)

      Losing an 80 GB HD nearly broke my heart, I can't imagine what losing 1.5 TB would do...

      /.: the only place where one gets a broken heart from a hard drive instead of the opposite sex.

    • Re:What I really want... (Score:5, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 10, 2008 @04:28PM (#24142273)

      So you're saying it's not how big it is, but it's how long it will last?

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by dave420 ( 699308 )
      get yourself some RAID and that won't be an issue. All hard disks, no matter how well-made they are, will fuck up one day. All of them. Every single one. With RAID you can take advantage of standard desktop HDDs, AND get the data longevity you want, all with existing hardware.

      • get yourself some RAID and that won't be an issue.

        RAID is not a substitute for backups!

        All hard disks, no matter how well-made they are, will fuck up one day. All of them. Every single one.

        Crucial corollaries:

        1) All file systems, no matter how well-made they are, will fuck up one day. All of them. Every single one. And that fuck up will be propagated to your RAID array.

        AND: 2) All RAID controllers, no matter how well-made they are, will fuck up one day. All of them. Every single one. And that fuck up will hose your RAID array.

        And let's not get into fires, theft, lightning / voltage spikes ...

        • Re:What I really want... (Score:4, Insightful)

          by hey! ( 33014 ) on Thursday July 10, 2008 @05:43PM (#24143809) Homepage Journal

          RAID is not a substitute for backups!

          Nor are backups a substitute for reliable operation.

          I don't even want to think about restoring 1TB to a consumer hard drive, even if I had dropped the thousands of dollars on tape drives and media to back it up.

          The thing that bothers me about the backup technologies available to consumers, apart from the fact you need to spend two orders of magnitude on drive and tape more than you spent on the disks you're backing up, is that there are so many technologies to choose from. In ancient days, there was just 9 track, and everybody could read it. Later there was DDS, DLT, or for suckers, Travan and for real suckers anything from Iomega. Now I look at dropping a thousand bucks on a flavor-of-the-month drive, and it gives me a queasy feeling.

          And in a world where a 160GB tape cartidge and a 160 GB hard disk SATA hard disk can both be bought for about $40, I'm open to spending a bit more to get the convenience of a standard interface hard disk, provided that it has enhanced reliability. It can be slower on transfer than tape, the convenience of random access probably more than makes up for it.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by tepples ( 727027 )

        get yourself some RAID

        I hope you are thinking of RAID6. If you put five of these disks into a typical RAID5 array, and one fails, it's likely that another will fail before the controller has a chance to read 6 TB from the other drives.

    • Losing an 80 GB HD nearly broke my heart, I can't imagine what losing 1.5 TB would do...

      Nearly break your balls. Or in some cases, business.

    • Seriously, I'd take half that storage if there was more assurance of my data integrity.

      How does more assurance of your data integrity obviate the need for backups? In other words, how does your behavior change even with those assurances?

      Losing an 80 GB HD nearly broke my heart, I can't imagine what losing 1.5 TB would do...

      Yeah, it'd be nice not to have hard drive failures, but don't blame the drive manufacturers for your lack of backups. There is no data solution so good that it doesn't need redundancy in some manner.

      • Re:What I really want... (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Chordonblue ( 585047 ) on Thursday July 10, 2008 @05:10PM (#24143167) Journal

        And what backup solutions exist for 1.5TBs today? Anything affordable, or just more RAID solutions (again, hard drives)?

        You can talk about backups all day long, but you know that when HP pushes out their latest consumer desktop with this drive, a home user is essentially buying a ticking time bomb.

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by JesseMcDonald ( 536341 )

          RAID isn't a backup. It only protects against disk failures, not OS or application faults or user error. To have a backup you need at least one copy of the data as it was at some point in the past, in addition to the most current version.

          RAID reduces downtime by allowing the system to continue to function after a disk failure. That's often important, but you still need proper backups. The home user doesn't need 99.999% uptime, but does care about preserving their data; the redundant HDDs required for a RAID

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by drsmithy ( 35869 )

      How about a drive that advertises longevity instead of storage density. Seriously, I'd take half that storage if there was more assurance of my data integrity.

      RAID1. Your prayers are answered.

    • Re:What I really want... (Score:5, Informative)

      by CopaceticOpus ( 965603 ) on Thursday July 10, 2008 @04:39PM (#24142531)

      Any data you truly care about needs to be on at least three devices, which are in at least two different buildings. Increasing the reliability of current drives won't be as helpful as bringing down prices so that multiple copies are more affordable. No amount of reliability will account for theft, fire, and human error.

      I use a set of three hard drives. One internal drive is in primary use. I back that up to an external drive frequently. Every couple weeks or so, I take that external drive to my remote location and swap it with another external drive, which then becomes my local backup.

      All copying is done with rsync to minimize drive wear and copy times. I just plug in the drive and run a batch file.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Tumbleweed ( 3706 )

      How about a drive that advertises longevity instead of storage density. Seriously, I'd take half that storage if there was more assurance of my data integrity.

      What you want is an SSD, then, though they're not available in even half this capacity as yet (wait a year or two, though). With wear-leveling, a modern SSD, from what I've read, tends to fail on a write attempt, leaving it still capable of being read (depending on what the filesystem does on a write failure). Thus, as an SSD gets older, instead of dy

  • Are the increases slowing down? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Orange Crush ( 934731 ) * on Thursday July 10, 2008 @04:28PM (#24142257)
    This could be a factor of my faulty memory, but a quick bit of googling didn't turn up anything useful. Is it just me, or has the rate at which storage capacity increases been slowing in recent years? It seems like we had a very rapid run-up to the 300gig mark (in a 3.5inch drive) then a much slower crawl to a terabyte and beyond.

    • Storage doubles every 14 months (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Muerte23 ( 178626 ) on Thursday July 10, 2008 @05:17PM (#24143297) Journal

      In kind of a weird corollary to Moore's law, the storage capacity of "affordable" consumer hard drives has doubled about every 14 months since at least 1991.

      In the summer 1991 a 40 MB drive was "good", and in the summer of 2008 a 1 TB drive is "good". That's a doubling period of almost exactly 14 months. I don't have the data to back up the dates in between, but I remember doing this calculation several years ago and getting the same number.

      If Moore's law continues to hold true, and processing power doubles every 18 months, yet storage capacity doubles every 14 months, at some point we will have so much storage that our processors will not have the capacity to ever utilize it all.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by matt21811 ( 830841 )

      I have been studying a variation on this for a while and the answer is yes.
      Hard drvie growth has slowed down, or more specifically, hard drive price improvement has slowed down.
      You can see on the 1st chart on my page that the last 5 years have been a marked decrease over the previous decade:
      http://www.mattscomputertrends.com/harddrives.html [mattscomputertrends.com]

      Interestingly, in just the last 4 months it has speeded up dramatically. Using my standard data sources there has been an 80% price improvement in the last 4 mont

  • Home Movies (Score:3, Interesting)

    by InlawBiker ( 1124825 ) on Thursday July 10, 2008 @04:50PM (#24142793)

    I don't think HD movies and the like are the main reason. A ripped Blueray movie for instance is really huge, but you just need enough work space to rip and compress it down to something usable.

    Home movies is a legit use. I recently converted all of my home movies to digital, from Hi-8 through a capture card. The raw, uncompressed data is really huge. My once "massive" 500GB drive is about full.

    Plus you need more disk space to edit the movies, and a way to back it up (compressed), but it's much easier to work on uncompressed video.

    I'm still recording on mini-dv. Now imagine the space you need for HD home movies.

  • I'd love to turn you on (Score:5, Funny)

    by HTH NE1 ( 675604 ) on Thursday July 10, 2008 @05:32PM (#24143605)

    from the they-had-to-count-them-all- dept.

    So now they know how many bits it takes to fill the Albert Hall?

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