Largest hard drive yet!!!

[avdven]

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.

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.

Read the entire press release here:

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

AJ

[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?

[Matty_Cross]

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

[avdven]

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

[khakisrule]

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?

[xmaddness]

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

[avdven]

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

AJ

[JCHostingAdmin]

I'd wanna use that as a webserver!

[avdven]

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

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.

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

[khakisrule]

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.