Largest hard drive yet!!!

Western Digital, one of the leaders in the hard drive industry has issued a press release touting a new hard drive, which will have capacities of up to 200 GB. I'm finally going to be able to have larger drives for my workstations. :-) I just hope they place 8 MB of cache in them, like that of the SE drives they have.

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WD Caviar 60 GB-per-platter 7,200 RPM hard drives will be offered in capacities ranging from 120 to 200 GB and will be available this July. To ensure quiet operation in noise-sensitive desktop/work station environments, Western Digital offers hard drives equipped with optional fluid dynamic bearing (FDB) motors.

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Read the entire press release here:

http://www.wdc.com/company/releases/...p?release=1404

AJ

wow, 200 GB's! Just imagine how many mp3's i could store with that sucker. I wonder what ever happened with IBM's electron storage drives. Supposedly they were using electrons to store info on drives. Havn't heard much about it since. I also remeber hearing about another drive that stored info holographically. So, instead of just saving info on the surface of the platter, you could save info throughout the entire platter itself. Any one hear about these?

xmad, are you talking about their 'pixie dust' (AFC) Drives?
http://www.storage.ibm.com/hdd/desk/ds120gxp.htm


Trying saying this 10x quickly.. antiferromagnetically-coupled

Xmadness: I haven't heard about the holographic hard drives, but I know there are many, many companies in search of better ways to store data because the technology used in modern hard drives is a pretty old (therefore, obsolete) technology, and to find ways to make them more efficient, smaller, etc.

Here are a white-paper and a press release from IBM, discussing "pixie-dust":
http://www.research.ibm.com/resource...xie_dust.shtml
http://www.ibm.com/news/2001/05/21.phtml

More information from IBM is available here: http://www.research.ibm.com/

Maxtor is also a big name working on increasing hard drive speed and capacity.
Here are two pages you may want to look at. The first is about Serial ATA technology, the next discusses 48-bit addressing for ATA drives.
http://www.maxtor.com/products/serialata/default.htm
http://www.maxtor.com/products/bigdrive/default.htm

AJ

Geez, I was just about to buy my new comp with my 100 gig hard drive. When are these new drives due out? I don't want to buy a 100 gig h/d and then go to the store the next day and feel bad cause the h/d I just bought is $20 cheaper and there are better ones out. Does anybody know when these new hard drives come out?

Yeah, "Pixie dust", in the discussion I was in they had just said electron sizes something. But I'm pretty sure thats what they were talking about. The holographic storage drive was being researched by many companies. Here is a link.

Holographic Storage

KhakisRule > they're supposed to be released in July (though they'll probably start out pretty expensive)

AJ

I'd wanna use that as a webserver!

Xmaddness > That's a very interesting article. Much of it still seems to be quite theoretical, though.

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So why don't you have a holographic drive hooked up in your house right now? Because no one has been able to figure out how to mass-manufacture them. The recording methods are too expensive and the photosensitive recording media--the discs on which the data is stored--are far too delicate to distribute.

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Too bad. Though, like plasma displays, they will eventually find a market niche (even if it's a small one) and go up from there. Plasma displays, for example, have dropped in price nearly 30-50% in the past few years. I recently purchased a 50' display for about $8,000, something which cost nearly $15,000 just two years ago due to the difficulties in mass producing them.

AJ

I don't mind the expense. I want a ton of storage space, and I don't want 2 drives. Thanks for the release date, I'll just wait for a while and see if they do come out on time.

xmadness > in all these sci-fi shows and movies when they start talking about artificial nural nets they are really talking about 3D storage methods, cause it would be imposible to store as much data as is held in a brain on anything less than 3 dementional.

wow! 200 G! that's big! i'm from the philippines and i'm planning to buy a new computer this coming july or august. avdven, you posted that the new hard drives would be released this july, but that's probably in the US. do you know when it would be released here in asia? the philippines to be exact... ?

No, I'm not sure. I checked a few places which might have it listed, but they all came up blank. Best bet would be to just find an online company which ships out of the US and order from them. Shipping may cost a b*tch, but if you want the size, that's probably the best way to go. I'll keep looking into it, though, and let you know if I find anything else out.

AJ

Wow...200 gigs~! I remember the good old days when i used to think 6 gigs was big. lol :P

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Wow...200 gigs~! I remember the good old days when i used to think 6 gigs was big. lol :P

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Does this make anyone else feel old? I can remember the days when people would have laughed at you if you mentioned giga anything and even mega was big.

lol, i have a 20 meg hardrive laying around somewhere in the pile of parts in my room

Yeah, I've got a 1.2 gig hard drive I am using right now!

*looks at her pathetic 20 gig hard drive and pouts*

200GB thats alot of porn, I still have lots of room left on my 15GB one.

Has anyone thought about how slow these thing would be. i have a forty cause the sixty's + take longer time to run programs and system function, oh well

It has to do with the RPM of it, though... so it could quite possibly not be any slower at all. And also, it won't apply with some of the newer technology. Speed is one of the reasons they're trying to come up with more ways of doing it.

man I hope these new drives come out soon, and are available on the site i want to buy my comp from. man, it would be amazing switching from 1.2 gigs to 200 gigs! does anybody know around how much they will cost?

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Originally posted here by xmaddness
wow, 200 GB's! Just imagine how many mp3's i could store with that sucker. I wonder what ever happened with IBM's electron storage drives. Supposedly they were using electrons to store info on drives. Havn't heard much about it since. I also remeber hearing about another drive that stored info holographically. So, instead of just saving info on the surface of the platter, you could save info throughout the entire platter itself. Any one hear about these?

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IBM was bought out by Hitachi.

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Does this make anyone else feel old? I can remember the days when people would have laughed at you if you mentioned giga anything and even mega was big.

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I remember my parents first computer had a 10 MB hard drive (DOS 2.0) and I thought I'd never run out of space. After a year, my father found 2 20 MB drives and put those in instead, and we were in heaven... Now, my main workstations have a minimum of 60-80 GB. The computer I'm using right now has dual 120's.

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Has anyone thought about how slow these thing would be. i have a forty cause the sixty's + take longer time to run programs and system function, oh well

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Regarding the speed, honestly, my 120s are the fastest drives I have (though that has to do with the amount of cache, 8 MB each). But still, I have plenty of 6-18 GB drives that are slower than my 30s, 60s, and greater. The slower drives are all 5,400 rpm, rather than 7,200, and they're all older as well (which means not only are they slower, but they louder too).

Just thought I'd give my feedback. :-)

AJ

Is the cache the buffer as well? I was looking up the specs for the hard drive I was going to buy on the w digital site, and I did not see cache, but I did see buffer.

Khakisrule > Yeah, it should be the same. If you look at the main page (http://www.westerndigital.com/) there's an image labeled "The Secret To Speed: WD'S 8 MB Cache". They may use the term interchangably, but I'm not sure. You'd have to look into it. Most WD's only come with 2 MB, if that helps.

AJ

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Originally posted here by str34m3r


Does this make anyone else feel old? I can remember the days when people would have laughed at you if you mentioned giga anything and even mega was big.

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Count me in :D.

I remember my first really big hdd at a size of 20mb. My first "really" big hdd was 420mb.. With the 420mb hdd could I run Dos, OS/2, *Nix and "Win3.x" and I still had some space left over for my BBS system :).

I guess I had enough space with the 420mb drive as with the 40gb's drives I have today, the storage demands have changed during the years as rapidly as the size of the disk's.

~micael

first mass storage 360k FDD, first HDD 5Mb .. I sold 2 comps yesterday for the wholesale cost of the 5Mb drive....

Ok.. now what will this thread be in another 10 years..

"geez.. you mean that when I replace my 30TB drive the smallest I can get is a 750TB..?"
or "I remember when 200G was large......"


Cheers