Hard disk price will plummet very soon

[Saint]

My friend who is working in Seagate told me, the plant is now rolling out high production of 200~400GB HDD.
The 40 and 80 GB HDD will phase out soon.
Therefore, we will soon see a price drop in HDD.
Wait a little bit and you will get higher capacity with cheaper price.

 

[Miles]

Owww insider information.

 

[russ_watters]

Hard drives have long been the fastest advancing technology in computers. My parents' original IBM PC (circa 1984) had a 20MB hard drive that came as an extra. The current largest is about 200GB. That's about 14 doublings in 20 years.

 

[Saint]

300 GB HDD is available now, with SCSI or Serial ATA technology, faster transfer rate.

 

[Greg Bernhardt]

dang, and I thought my 100gig seagate I bought last year was still stop notch

 

[Learning Curve]

Who uses 400gb?

 

[chroot]

Well, I have 120GB of music right now, plus another 50GB of audio books, movies, and other things. I would love to have 400GB of storage, and I feel pretty confident that I could eventually use it all up.

- Warren

 

[Jake]

Ah, I remember the good old days when I had trouble filling up 2 gigs :)

 

[BlackVision]

Ah, I remember the good old days when I had trouble filling up 2 gigs :)

Ha! I remember when I was crazy over a 250 MB hard drive.

 

[aychamo]

I'm not as old-school as yall, but my first hard-drive was 120megs :) I remember when I ordered my 540meg and it was *huge*.

I'd love to see hard-drive prices fall dramatically......!

 

[graphic7]

I've always been satisfied with my 36gb SCSI RAID array. If I need to store some multimedia files, I use some type of *cheaper* optical media.

 

[enigma]

I remember being happy with my 64K Commodore 64 with no hard disk as a kid...

I had a Vic 20 too, but didn't use it too much.

 

[Integral]

Y'all are noobs! They sold something called a Sider for the Apple II, a wopping 10Mb of HD, course this was '82. I could not begin to justiy spending about $700 for it. It wasn't till about '87 that I finally got a 286 with a 20MB HD.

 

[K.J.Healey]

I remember being happy with my 64K Commodore 64 with no hard disk as a kid...

Yea, but on the c64 all we needed was the good ol 1541 Disk drive, and my boxes of software. I had probably 1000 disks, 90% of them games.

 

[enigma]

phhhh. Disk Drives...

Remember the tape drive?

Load "Game 1"

*push play*

Ah. good times!

 

[check]

phhhh. Disk Drives...

Remember the tape drive?

Load "Game 1"

*push play*

Ah. good times!

Dont forget that if you had multiple programs on that tape you'd have to fast forward to the correct spot. Aww, I miss my Vic20.

 

[check]

Haha, just thought I'd add on this quote from The Simpsons:

Frink: Well, sure, the Frinkiac-7 looks impressive, don’t touch it, but I predict that within 100 years, computers will be twice as powerful, 10,000 times larger, and so expensive that only the five richest kings of Europe will own them.
Apu: Could it be used for dating?
Frink: Well, theoretically, yes. But the computer matches would be so perfect as to eliminate the thrill of romantic conquest. Mw-hurgn-whey.

 

[graphic7]

Ah, don't make puns at tape drives. They are invaluable backup devices. I use a DDS3 drive in my workstation to backup data every night.

 

[Locrian]

I'm glad harddrive space is expanding fast. My 30gig drive seems absurdly small these days; I can barely put antyhing on it. Recently I kept running out of room and nearly fell out of my chair when I realized Unreal Tournament 2004 took up almost 9 gigs alone.

 

[Marijn]

Ah, don't make puns at tape drives. They are invaluable backup devices. I use a DDS3 drive in my workstation to backup data every night.

Why don't you use an external harddisk for backup purposes?

 

[graphic7]

I acquired a DDS3 drive for free a few years ago along with a few tapes. DDS3 tapes typically hold 4GB of data uncompressed and 10GB of data compressed. That's not too bad to be free. Plus, a tape drive is an impressive piece of equipment to have in a workstation. Unices typically sport some excellent tape backup tools such as tar, cpio, and mt that I'm rather fond of.

The workstation I use the tape drive on is my SGI workstation, which does not have USB. External SCSI hard drives are rather expensive, even for storage of 10GB of data.

 

[Saint]

Do you think DVD with super high capacity will replace HDD one day?

 

[russ_watters]

Why don't you use an external harddisk for backup purposes?

Reliability: A tape has no moving parts or electronics. Capacity: you can back up to a new tape every day if you want and archive terrabytes worth of data.

Most home users don't use them - most businesses do.

Do you think DVD with super high capacity will replace HDD one day?

No, they are entirely different animals. First off, optical drives don't and can't (until holographic memory) have anywhere near as much capacity as hard drives. Second, optical drives are slow. Third, optical drives are removable.

 

[graphic7]

Tapes, especially DDS tapes, aren't realiable as I'd like them to be, Russ. I typically use a type for about 75-150 writes and after that, the quality starts degrading. Usually, I'll retention the tapes every write after 75 writes, but that doesn't help much. I wish I did have a DDS4 drive. That's 20GB of compressed data for pennies compared to hard drives or DVD media.

Most people don't like tapes - they aren't block devices. That means you can't put a filesystem on them. You have to use "interesting" utilities like tar or cpio if you're running Unix or their Microsoft equivalents to write or read from the tapes.

 

[Saint]

I plan to buy a 80GB HDD next month.
In malaysia, ATA100 HDD is still the most popular one.

 

[dekoi]

My 120 gb harddrive total capacity is enough for me. And i have several movies, gb's of music, and many mb's of images. I don't see the need for 400 gb, other than central network nodes.

 

[Tom McCurdy]

lol 250 gig is nothing

editiing movies takes up space like nothing else

btw
I saw a 3 terabyte harddrive for 30,000 dollars in popular science. I did a quick google but couldn't find it but i did see for sure
1.6 terabyte hard drives.

 

[check]

Jeez, no kidding. Digital video editing, full frame and uncompressed takes up so much space. My old high schools had pretty good DPS Velocity systems. I think the storage unit on it totalled over a terabyte. Even with that amount of space and only a few students using it for fairly short videos, it needed to get cleaned out every other month.

 

[Tom McCurdy]

lol also besides those super hard drives
i just found one standard in a dell mag
that was 500 gig

 

[Saint]

is SATA much faster than ATA HDD?

 

[Krazie]

I plan on buying a 160 gig hard drive in January. And a dvd burner. I just got high speed internet today and only have a 16 gig hard drive. It is 75 percent full, and I think that I will fill it very fast now that I have high speed. I would buy it right now, but I am trying to save my money to buy my mom a used bose stereo.

 

[Zantra]

I remember being happy with my 64K Commodore 64 with no hard disk as a kid...

I had a Vic 20 too, but didn't use it too much.

My best friend had a vic 20.. came with a tape recorder and lightning turbo 300 baud modem- yowza!

I also used to play moon patrol on my friend's commadore 64.. I rocked that game.. heheh

 

[ek]

Who uses 400gb?

That's what's always been said though.

The size of programs and documents etc. will catch up soon enough. In time we'll refer to 400 GB like the guy who's talking about his parents' 20 MB HD.

 

[Chronos]

I will never forget [probably] the time I was browsing around in a computer store. A salesman was showing this lady hard drives. He pointed out one and said, "This is the one I recommend. You will never fill it up, it's a full gig."

 

[alexkerhead]

My friend who is working in Seagate told me, the plant is now rolling out high production of 200~400GB HDD.
The 40 and 80 GB HDD will phase out soon.
Therefore, we will soon see a price drop in HDD.
Wait a little bit and you will get higher capacity with cheaper price.

I wish you had told me before I got my last HDD
120GB 8MB ATA-133 Seagate

 

[Macgyver]

Do you think DVD with super high capacity will replace HDD one day?

It won’t replace HDD. HDDs will just become optical. There are a few companies working on holographic high-density storage devices. Possibly in the range of a terabyte of storage, with a transfer speed of a gigabit/sec. That would be enough to put even the best magnetic drive to shame.

http://computer.howstuffworks.com/holographic-memory.htm
(there are better articles out there but i couldn't find the one i read so i gave up)

Also there is a new type of disc that is coming out that beats out DVDs. The Blu-ray disc comes in 25 GB and 50 GB sizes.
http://www.blu-raydisc.com/general_information/Section-13577/Index.html

 

[Anttech]

Flash mem has I/O of quicker than GB/s already

 

[hitssquad]

Transfer rate of flash memory

Flash mem has I/O of quicker than GB/s already

Which flash is that? Lexar markets the world's fastest Compact Flash and it sustained-writes at only 12MB/sec (80x).

 

[hitssquad]

Gigabit transfer rates, holographic vs magnetic storage

There are a few companies working on holographic high-density storage devices. Possibly in the range of a terabyte of storage, with a transfer speed of a gigabit/sec. That would be enough to put even the best magnetic drive to shame.

Magnetic drives are already more than halfway there, at http://www.tomshardware.com/storage/20031119/. They may arrive at gigabit/sec speed soon with the advent of 20K RPM drives and continuously greater storage density.

 

[Macgyver]

What is the max transfer rate of IDE ribon cable?

 

[russ_watters]

100 MB (that's megaBYTES)/sec is the current fastest standard.

 

[hitssquad]

ATA/133 was introduced three years ago, Russ.

 

[russ_watters]

ATA/133 was introduced three years ago, Russ.

Oops - I should know that (I have it).

 

[alexkerhead]

there is not noticable improvement of SATA over ATA-133, ATA-133 is still fast, and upgrading just to have SATA would be worthless.

 

[hitssquad]

Reasons to step up to the SATA interface

For most drives, the increased bandwidth might not effect much of an improvement in perfromance, but http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=22-144-160&depa=1 uses the SATA interface. The Western Digital Raptor 74GB 10,000RPM SATA hard drive is reportedly a very fast drive, and one might imagine that its performance would be hindered by using the lower-bandwidth IDE ATA/133 interface. There are no drives that spin faster than 7.2K RPM that use the IDE interface, and if you want one without going to SCSI or fibre channel you will have to opt for SATA.

Additionally, the SATA interface offers RAID capability, and the IDE interface does not.

Tangentially, it appears that all laptops and laptop hard drives https://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?mode=hybrid&t=40635 the SATA interface.

 

[Anttech]

Which flash is that? Lexar markets the world's fastest Compact Flash and it sustained-writes at only 12MB/sec (80x).

Yeh sorry my bad, I was thinking of PuRAM that i-go were doing (which has an unbeilevable I/O)... Seems they have gone bust www.go-l.com

Anyhow it is similar to Flash

 

[hitssquad]

PuRAM and Rocket Drive as high-speed solid-state 'disks'

There are http://notebookforums.com/archive/index.php/t-7934 . The Rocket Drive is simply a PCI card with four DIMM slots on it and that simulates a hard drive. You can use four of them at once for up to 16GB of high-speed access. It features an external power supply so, I would imagine, just like with a regular hard drive the data does not go away when your computer is turned off.

It has been mentioned on the internet that a RAID array of flash card might provide fantastic access times and data throughput. It has also been mentioned that http://www.m-sys.com/ (supplier of self-contained flash computer chip devices called DiskOnChip to the military and other high-performance buyers) offers flash drives of up to 36GB. If they do offer capacities that high, it would be surprising to me since they historically (1998-~2000) seemed to be struggling to expand their flash capacities.


http://www.igo.com/default.asp is an unrelated company, by the way.

 

[alexkerhead]

Additionally, the SATA interface offers RAID capability, and the IDE interface does not.

really?
I could swear I owned a Gigabyte mobo with IDE raid channels?

this is not my mobo, but it is a IDE raid mobo
http://www.aberdeeninc.com/abcatg/mb6601.htm
maybe http://www.aberdeeninc.com/abcatg/mb6601.htm could help with your research?

 

[hitssquad]

Thanks for the correction. I didn't know until you told me just now about IDE RAID. I had thought that a major reason for excitement about SATA was RAID capability.

 

[alexkerhead]

Thanks for the correction. I didn't know until you told me just now about IDE RAID. I had thought that a major reason for excitement about SATA was RAID capability.

yeah, the IDE raid is very uncommon and that mistake is extremely common, but I knew, becuase I baught a Gigabyte mobo a long time ago, that had 4X IDE channels for RAID 0 and 1 setups, and there weren't many compatible HDDs for it back then, it used ATA-133 UDMA6 HDs only.