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Author Topic: Hard Drives Reach 1 Terrabyte Storage Mark Gulbrandsen Resident Trollmaster Posts: 16657 From: Music City Registered: Jun 99 posted 04-09-2007 08:36 PM                     I would have to say this is a pretty landmark thing in computer data storage.... its taken just 24 years to get there... the first 3.5" hard drive was marketed in 1983... Article Link Just when you got used to hard drives with hundreds of gigabytes (hundreds of billions of bytes) they do it: make one with a terabyte (a trillion bytes). Yes, you can now get a terabyte hard drive on a desktop PC. Breaking the ice with a Hitachi drive was Dell, with “Area 51” game-oriented machines from its Alienware subsidiary. The 1T option initially costs $500. In case you’re wondering, as printed text a terabyte would occupy 100 million reams of paper, consuming some 50,000 trees. It is enough to hold 16 days (not hours) of DVD-quality video, or a million pictures, or almost two years worth of continuous music. You might not have any songs that last for two years, but that’s irrelevant, indicated Henry Baltazar, storage analyst for The 451 Group, a technology analyst firm in San Francisco. “There will be a demand for it, since a lot of people have digital media, like movies, pictures and music,” Baltazar told LiveScience. “Larger devices will become more commonplace, and we will see the same kind of transition from gigabyte to terabyte drives as we previously saw from megabyte to gigabyte drives—in fact, the move from 500 gigabytes to a terabyte has taken longer than expected.” The leap from 500G to 1T required a breakthrough in “areal density” (how tight the bytes are packed on the surface of the disk), according to Doug Pickford, a marketing executive at Hitachi Global Storage Technologies. The trick, he explained, was to move to Perpendicular Magnetic Recording (PMR), where each bit is a perpendicular rather than a linear magnetized spot on the disk—as if the bits were standing up rather than lying down. Currently, areal density is growing at about 35 to 40 percent per year, and the techniques used to create the 1T drive are expandable to make a 5T drive, Pickford said. More work will be needed to surpass the 5T hurdle, but he foresaw no physical limitations until drives reach a capacity of at least 50T. At that point, they’ll hold about a century of music. Incidentally, for planning purposes, the next level is the petabyte (a quadrillion bytes); and then the exabyte (one quintillion bytes); and then the zettabyte (one sextillion bytes); and then the yottabyte (one septillion bytes.) The very first hard drive was the IBM RAMAC that came out in 1956. It had fifty-24 inch disks that held a total of about 5mb of data. It was only available for lease back then for the small fee of $35,000 a year... The photo is of a RAMAC hard drive array thats being restored for display.  |  IP: Logged Mike Heenan Phenomenal Film Handler Posts: 1896 From: Scottsdale, AZ, USA Registered: Mar 2000 posted 04-09-2007 08:41 PM                     Anybody figure out how much porn will fit on there?  |  IP: Logged Tim Reed Better Projection Pays Posts: 5246 From: Northampton, PA Registered: Sep 1999 posted 04-09-2007 11:28 PM                       quote: Mark Gulbrandsen It had fifty-24 inch disks that held a total of about 5mb of data. Yeah, but that's when 5mb was worth 5mb...  |  IP: Logged Monte L Fullmer Film God Posts: 8367 From: Nampa, Idaho, USA Registered: Nov 2004 posted 04-09-2007 11:41 PM                     quote: Mike Heenan Anybody figure out how much porn will fit on there? (buy one and let us know .. ) Then, you'll be seeing flash drives that are going to follow this storage trend very quickly. ..as with Tim, I do remember when IBM 8088 computers had a 10mB, 5.5 Winchester HD loaded with DOS 3.30...and if you were the lucky one, also loaded with Windows 1.03 being displayed on an amber monochrome, 11inch screen. Who ever thought of a computer being converted to a multimedia monster when they were originally constructed as strict business machines .... -Monte  |  IP: Logged Bobby Henderson "Ask me about Trajan." Posts: 10973 From: Lawton, OK, USA Registered: Apr 2001 posted 04-09-2007 11:56 PM                     I remember back in the early 1990s when having more than 1GB of hard disc space was a really big deal. 2GB drives cost a bunch in 1993. A little over a decade has passed and we now have hundreds of times that capacity. A few years from now and our current data storage maximums will seem kinda puny.  |  IP: Logged Joe Redifer You need a beating today Posts: 12859 From: Denver, Colorado Registered: May 99 posted 04-10-2007 12:45 AM                        We've had TWO 1-terabyte external hard drives at work for awhile now. One of them is obviously two 500GB drives in the same enclosure, but the other seems to be the size of a normal drive or so. They are a lot smaller than they seem, and the space goes away quick. We'll be getting at least one new TB drive per year.  |  IP: Logged John Walsh Film God Posts: 2490 From: Connecticut, USA, Earth, Milky Way Registered: Oct 1999 posted 04-10-2007 11:31 AM                     Ahhh .... I remember when .... My first hard drive was an 25Mb MFM type that cost $300. 1983, I think....  |  IP: Logged Mike Blakesley Film God Posts: 12767 From: Forsyth, Montana Registered: Jun 99 posted 04-10-2007 06:06 PM                        I paid $449 for my first hard drive -- 40 megabytes. I installed it in a Radio Shack computer that had a whopping 640k of memory. Somewhere around 1987, give or take a year. I have an old Radio Shack catalog from the early 80s around here somewhere that advertises an outboard hard drive for something like $3500...and says it will hold "thousands of pages" of text.  |  IP: Logged Jason Burroughs Jedi Master Film Handler Posts: 654 From: Allen, TX Registered: Jun 99 posted 04-10-2007 08:05 PM                     We have a RAMAC on display at my office. Needless to say the thing is HUGE and heavy. We also have an ENIAC on display as well. = [ 04-14-2007, 09:05 PM: Message edited by: Jason Burroughs ]  |  IP: Logged Bobby Henderson "Ask me about Trajan." Posts: 10973 From: Lawton, OK, USA Registered: Apr 2001 posted 04-10-2007 10:34 PM                     Many don't realize it, but much of the original ENIAC computer is stored at Fort Sill, not far from where I live. Only some of the control panels and a few other components are on display at places like the Smithsonian. A number of different politicians, military people and businessmen are trying to raise money and momentum for a new museum for the US Army to be built on designated land at Fort Sill. ENIAC I is one of the highest priority items they want to put on display. The computer system was used for many different military and science purposes, from doing lots of ballistics calculations to work on America's first H-bomb.  |  IP: Logged John Walsh Film God Posts: 2490 From: Connecticut, USA, Earth, Milky Way Registered: Oct 1999 posted 04-11-2007 08:05 AM                     I read a magazine article years ago that described how a small company was still using a UNIVAC computer for their accounting. I'm sorry I can't remember the name of the magazine. The name of the article was (I think) "Last of the First." It described things like water cooling leaks; there was a picture of a fan blowing dry a rack full of tubes. The mag tape transport had a feature where, if it found a bad section (that gave read errors) it would punch a hole at that location. An opto sensor would see the hole and know not to read/write there ever again.  |  IP: Logged Joel N. Weber II Expert Film Handler Posts: 115 From: Somerville, MA, USA Registered: Dec 2005 posted 04-11-2007 07:42 PM                     Water cooling might happen again at some point in the future as a way to cool big data centers; allegedly it would be significantly more efficient than the air cooling that is generally used today.  |  IP: Logged Jason Burroughs Jedi Master Film Handler Posts: 654 From: Allen, TX Registered: Jun 99 posted 04-13-2007 10:04 AM                     quote: Joel N. Weber II Water cooling might happen again at some point in the future as a way to cool big data centers This is already happening. The vast majority of CRACs and in-row coolers are chilled water or glycol mix cooled. There are water cooled cabinets on the market with the water look comming to the cabinet itself. With server densities constantly increasing, having the cooling at the cabinet is the only way to effectivly contain the heat produced by 20+ Kilowatts. Projected densities are exceeding 40 and may go up to 60 Kw in a cabinet. There are aircooled cabinets that are pushing 22-24 Kw but that's about as far as air can go. Manufacturers are considering water to a chill plate in the server itself. Mainframes have had water loops run to them in the past.  |  IP: Logged Joel N. Weber II Expert Film Handler Posts: 115 From: Somerville, MA, USA Registered: Dec 2005 posted 04-13-2007 07:26 PM                     It's not obvious to me that these ever increasing power densities are especially desireable. Especially after I came across something explaining that, above a certain power density, you have to put the air conditioning on battery power because if you don't, the computers will overheat in the 20 seconds the air conditioner isn't running while the generator starts up after the power goes out.  |  IP: Logged Jim Bedford Jedi Master Film Handler Posts: 597 From: Telluride, CO, USA (733 mi. WNW of Rockwall, TX but it seems much, much longer) Registered: Jun 99 posted 04-14-2007 10:20 AM                        Looking toward the future, what comes after "terrabyte" and when do you think we can expect it?  |  IP: Logged

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