New kind of hard drive coming soon!

Here are some really good articles dated april 4th 2005 all about the technology used in these drives:

Hitachi Lays Groundwork for 20-Gb Microdrive with Century-Old Technology
This also explains the specific technology used.

Hitachi Lays Groundwork For Increased Hard Drive Capacities

Hitachi goes perpendicular, promises 1TB PC drives, 20GB Microdrives by 2007

Have fun!

That 258GB result would refer to one side of a single platter. Most modern day drives have two platters. Some have three. Some used to have 8.
It really would be a 1 TB drive... yum!

All the fuzz about capacity and speed, what about reliability? I would like nothing more than a HD that doesn't have complex mechanics that can brake or get worn out. I wouldn't even mind if it would be small, just as long it wouldn't brake.

What we need to do instead of getting bigger drives is faster. Your Hd is the main bottleneck in system speed. The fastest hd's have a search speed of around 3.4 mille secs. While Ram is all the way down in the 1-10 Nano secs for recovery speed(no i dont know the numbers off the top of my head but w/e its fast). Lets erase loadtimes before we get to terrabyte level drives : p

S/PATA with NCQ is pretty quick
I think the evolution will continue on par with the demand.

Mega large storage capacity is RIAA and MPAAs worst nightmare. Having a Tetrabyte of storage and limited funds is healthy encourgement for users to illegal download whatever media they desire not to mention the ability to save thousands on overpriced software.

God bless piracy.

Yes, speed is a very important factor when choosing a harddrive. When I designed my custom computer, I put two 36.7 GB (or something like that) 15,000 RPM harddrives into it. Yes, it was expensive, but I've seen a demo of two exactly identical computers, except one had a 7,200 RPM drive and the other a 15k RPM drive. The 15k RPM was not just a bit faster, it was like somebody put a second processor in it! Games loaded twice as fast because the harddrive was able to get all the data into the RAM and the graphics card's memory twice as fast as the 7,200 RPM drive. Faster RAM isn't worth anything without a harddrive that can use the RAM's speed to an advantage.

No, the demo wasn't hosted by a harddrive manufacturer, my friend did it (he's really rich so he can burn that kind of money).

Speed before capacity!

Totally agreed diehard unless this toshiba drive has improved seek time it is cool, but leaves us in essentially the same place speedwise.

WTF? Did I read someone with a mac that has more then 1meg of ram? WTF? What a waste, no paper weight needs more then that, cause it sucks. How much space/ram/cpu do you need to play a movie? Type a document? I like the "macs are never hacked" yes, just like yugos are never stolen, doesn't make them better, it means they pieces of #.

Anyways,got a new vid card, been playing HL2 for about 9 hours straight, which someone with a mac can't do, cause macs can barely play pong let along HL2 or Far Cry.

Originally posted by James the Lesser
WTF? Did I read someone with a mac that has more then 1meg of ram?

1 MB of RAM? This is ancient technology. My sister is purchasing a Hewlett-Packard with 1gig of RAM and it's upgradable to 2 gigs.

By the year 2010, the norm will be multi-tera-byte hard-drives, CPU's within the terahertz range and RAMs with 50-100 gig capacity.

With everything getting smaller and smaller, I'd have to say that what is considered cutting edge today will fit into the space of Motorola Razor cell-phone in 5 years.

Just my guess. Just think, top-of-the-line computers from 5 years ago are obsolete. you can't even find parts for them enymore. Why would someone want something so slow anyways?

10years from now we're probably going to be seeing S/PATA & NCQ going the way of the dinosaurs as well...I've got 200Gb storage available over two machines, and it seriously is nowhere NEAR enough. Terabyte hard drives would be a godsend...assuming they can improve seek times. At the mo I'd only use a huge capacity (400Gb) hdd for backup only. They're too slow really for performance applications. Give me a nice raptor (and earmuffs) anyday hehe.

I think it was Toshiba who are already producing quite small capacity (something around the 20Gb mark) hard drives built from flash memory (read: no moving parts). This is the way to go because higher platter density + more platters = more chance of failure. This is the same reason I'm a little skeptical about blue ray..50Gb on one dvd? With pit densities that high surely even the slightest scuff is going to destroy hundreds of megabytes of data :S

I wouldn't be suprised if they come up with some new form of dynamic RAID either...hotplug another disk and bang, instant capacity, speed or redundancy. I don't think it's even theoretically possible at the moment, but who nows

when I was in collage I ran a mp3 server right before napsters I had around 10 thouand songs on it. It was ranked by mp3.com as the number 2 server in the nation at the time. I had 4.3 tarra bites of songs downloaded from it in 48 days. I had 300+ people loged into the server 24 hours a day. It was orgonized by group then by album.

Originally posted by EnronOutrunHomerun
The sad thing is, Pentium, AMD and all these other hardware companies are just sitting on this technology....Sure they're doing it for consumer affordability, but also to price gouge us in sequential release dates that supposedly showcase "the newest and best".....

I feel like a hamster stuck in a spinning wheel that just won't stop spinning sometimes....And someone's out there just laughing away at me....

Part of it is also software limitations. If only we could program fast enough to keep up with the tech...

check this out, 1Tb drives already available on the maket:

www.lacie.com...
check out this 2TB drive:

www.lacie.com...

I don't really jizz over computers anymore. However I did read 2 years ago in the economist magazine that intel had a 10 Ghz chip (at a time of an average 2Ghz on the market). So, of course they are sitting on it. I would be surprised if they weren't to be honest. Not sitting on it entails great risk. Can I get a fast enough processor out in time for the software, hardrive, graphics card, etc etc.
I'm quite sure, N-vidia and the other graphic card producer (forgot name) plus the hard drive producers and optical disk producers and major software manufacturers aka microsoft all regulary talk to one another and plan accordingly. Wouldn't you? I would. In fact, although I haven't looked into it, I wouldn't surprised to hear that hardware manufacturers are owned by 2 or possibly 3 major players who own their plants in Malaysia but under different company names, or at least they own each other's stocks.
Big business is very incestuous.
Lol, imagine if Macintosh ran up against a tech barrier in 1990 and people had usb 512MB memory sticks like now. That would be funny.

Another thing. It's interesting that someone brought up older computers booting up faster. I have found the same experience.
When Bill gates said something along the lines of "we'll never need more that 354 kb" or something like that, I think it's true. They just bulk up programs with ever more code to justify "faster" computers.

I dont agree with the old is better hypothesis, how user friendly were old computers in comparison with todays? I remember my stepdad having one of those computers where the monitor is all green, i cant remember the name of it but i do know it was the most hard to use piece of junk in house

netbound and labasta:

I read a recent article that Intel has been pretty well hit a brock wall at the 4GHz mark regarding processor speeds.

Once you get into microwave speeds, all sorts of weird things happen - for one, you have to take into account the length of each circuit connecting each transistor as harmonics are created.

I believe Intel are now looking at a double layer processor of some kind (much like parallel processors I believe).

I think the next major leap in processor technology will involve the manipulation of light using crystal technology and resonance etc.

I can't wait for the day when they also have solid state hard disk drives...crystal manipulation again maybe?

Cheers

JS

Originally posted by LordGoofus

I think it was Toshiba who are already producing quite small capacity (something around the 20Gb mark) hard drives built from flash memory (read: no moving parts). This is the way to go because higher platter density + more platters = more chance of failure.

Now this is what I call advancement. I just get chills when I think about what's going on inside my 80gb HD. Hope to soon find these cheap, would be great to have at least your OS and other sensitive data on them.

Originally posted by James the Lesser
WTF? Did I read someone with a mac that has more then 1meg of ram? WTF? What a waste, no paper weight needs more then that, cause it sucks. How much space/ram/cpu do you need to play a movie? Type a document? I like the "macs are never hacked" yes, just like yugos are never stolen, doesn't make them better, it means they pieces of sh*t.

Anyways,got a new vid card, been playing HL2 for about 9 hours straight, which someone with a mac can't do, cause macs can barely play pong let along HL2 or Far Cry.

What is your problem? Mac's aren't that bad! And for your information, that Mac Classic I have can't be hacked because it isn't even hooked up to the internet. I only use internet on my new iMac because otherwise it would be too expensive.

So, you think that Mac's can only play pong... yeah if you tore the motherboard out and blew it up with gasoline that would be true. Well FYI, Mac's have excellent graphics, and they can play something like X-plane set to very high-resolution, which is about equal to HL2 or Far Cry.

By the way, another interesting fact: The third fastest super-computer is based on Macintosh G5's. Don't believe me? Watch this short video here and see what you think about Mac's then.

Plus those G5's can hold up to 8 GB of RAM, which, as far as I know, is more than any Dell sold today can handle. And they have two 2.5 GHz 64-bit processors, which is equal to TWO AMD Athlon processors. They were made by Apple and IBM in a joint effort.

Yes this is off topic, I'm just sick and tired of the ignorance of you people out there who judge a Mac before they even use one, and if they do they're just probably crappy school computers (which always suck, whether Mac or Windows just to save money).

[edit on 4/9/2005 by diehard_democrat]



[edit on 4/9/2005 by diehard_democrat]

Has anyone heard of BLUERAY? the 50 gig DVD disc?


Anywho....Fact- computer power doubles every 18 months, fact- whenever a technology reaches its physical limit a new technology takes its place, the last time this happened was the micro chip taking the place of the valves and transistors in TV's etc.

In the next ten years we will hit a problem with our current technology in that we will reach its absolute physical limit in speed and data storage, it might be a lot less that ten years at the rate we are going now.

The next technology will be quantum computers, this technology make our current tech look like something from the victorian era, its absolutely amazing.
By 2020 we could have quantum computers that run at prosessor speeds of 10 teraflops, 20 years later and we are talking 500 teraflops!!! The memory capacity of such a computer would be astronomical - 100'000 to a million terraflops of dats storage.

www.cs.caltech.edu...

news.bbc.co.uk...

strc.herts.ac.uk...