Hitachi's new 400GB drive
 

400 GB. *Cough* *Gasp* *Wheeze* ...I'm sorry, did you say 400 GB? That's ridiculous.

It works with regular old parallel ATA, or the newer, faster serial ATA. And it spins at 7200 RPM. Hot-fuckin-diggety.

Of course, five years from now, our Terabyte drives will sneer at a measley 400GB. [half-empty]Too bad all the data will be so mired with Digital Rights Management crap that it won't be worth having.[/half-empty]

Re: Hitachi's new 400GB drive
 

OW!

Damn, I think I need to pad the underside of my desk...

May I have one basket, please?

AHH to win the LOTTO !!! You network folks tell me what this would be a raid what 12 config ????

Any idea what this thing is gonna cost? I have quite a bit a video and vinyl that I would like to digitize but won't even consider it till I get something of that magnitude to hold it.

What's everyone's best guess as to when or if we should be looking for them in CompUSA? Will they be sold as standalones?

I was getting ready to pay some dude to convert all my home video to DVD but I think I'll hold off.

If I were to venture a wild, uneducated guess, as I am prone to doing (*cough*) I'd say that you'll probably see it for sale in November or so, probably costing around $420 initially.

400 GB is a pittance. This one is more of a *Choke*-*Grunt*-*Seizure* than a *Cough*-*Gasp*-*Wheeze*... 2.5 Terabytes of storage... Solid state. That means no disk, all memory. I/O rate is 36Gbit/s. Yowza.

mmmmmm.... 2.5 terabytes of porn......

Man, I don't know what I would do with 400 gigs of space. Even with all the crap on my system now it doesn't even approach 400 gigs. I ask myself "Do I really want to lose 400 GBs of data when the drive fails?". You could always RAID it, at double the cost or course.

Related to the feds new 2.5 TB RAM drive:
[Simpsons]
Homer: So what have you been doing since graduation?

Homer's former roomate: I invented a program that downloads porn one million times faster.

Marge: Who needs that much porn?

Homer: mmmm...one million times.

A twelve drive RAID system? From what little I know of RAID and modern hard drive quality, isn't that pretty much increasing your chances of losing all of your data about 12 times? :rolleyes:

Picture showing up for a government surplus auction and finding a 2.5 terabyte chip on the table for $20.

As for a 400 gb hard drive. You probably have to mail back two registration cards, one to the manufacturer and the other to the RIAA.:band:

Depending on RAID type it is usually used to make sure you don't use your data. i'd pay more for a 200G HDD with a 5 year warranty than a 400g with a 1 year.

True, a "normal" user has little use for such obscene amounts of data storage in their personal computer (not that I fraternize with "normal" people *cough*). Not today, anyhow. But there are lots of viable applications. For instance, a home-made webserver could use these on a RAID 1 or RAID 3 array, and get a ton of space with relatively inexpensive performance and reliablility.

There are also a number of near-future uses... imagine an iTunes-style system for movies... you could store somewhere in the neighborhood of 185 hours of DVD-quality video on one of these drives if I'm doing the math right. Wrap a small case, an interface, and a 6" LCD around one of these, with S-video out, and you have a huge, highly-portable movie collection which is smaller than a laptop. Plug it into the TV at home, and take it with you on the road.

Disk space isn't a bottleneck for most people... yet. But just wait until some of this neat stuff shows up. 400GB won't seem so obscene then.

hot_pastrami

A year ago now I had a box sitting on my desk that served DVDs and Music to an entire household. It had a 1Tb array (6x200G). Pity it never got past development stages.

Nice. A pity, indeed, that it wasn't developed further. What was the stumbling block that killed it? Technical problems? Cost? Hardware, er, cannibalism *cough*? That would be a neat toy. Of course ripping a large collection of DVDs would be a long, involved process.

Last information I had puts the world's first, commercially sold, optical storage device at one to two years away. To appreciate the future market, one should remember the technology competition between disk drives and bubble memory.

hot_pastrami:

Life. Combination of the compnay we were talking to going under and changes in my life and 2 of the other devs. We had a device that was about the size of a classic mac, wasn't very loud and could serve up everything, running on linux of course. Interface was really the only thing left needed. There are still 2 dev samples that the guys are using personally.

The project was actually a platform for experimenting with metadata generation systems. To that end if was fairly effective. We didn't get as far as we would have liked (complete auto-metadate generation for all imported media) but we did a fucking good job getting close.

Was before it's time really, too expensive and geeky for the mainstream but I'll bet a grand that in 10 years we'll all have something like it in our houses.