5 Terrabyte Hard Drive...

[florida320]

...just saw the post about CPU's. What about hard drives, are they falling behind? The biggest hard drive 3 1/2" 7200 RPM is what, 250 GB? Why is there no 5TB drive?
Saw a NAS box that could store 1TB, but was real slow and costed a fortune.

...since with TIVO/DVR you can upload your movies to a PC, space is needed.

[Ilwrath]

Eh... make your own.  Get a SATA RAID card and stripe yourself a 1.5TB drive from 7 250GB drives (losing one as a parity drive for fault tolerance).

Not exactly bargain basement cheap, but probably cheaper and faster than the SAN you saw.

[Argo]

You can get 400 GB drives.

[florida320]

True...downside is that it you kinda need a tower to store all those drives.

Was just wondering, since there is so much development around CPU, Memory, Graphic cards, and so on, why not on the hard drive side.

Like one hard drive, with a huge storage capacity.

[drHirudo]

Was just wondering, since there is so much development around CPU, Memory, Graphic cards, and so on, why not on the hard drive side.

There is development on the hard drive side, and considering the storage it's even faster than the CPUs.
Remeber the Winchesters? 20MB costing a fortune, weighted a ton, a was extremely noisy. Now you can have as much as 10,000 storage more for 1/100th the price, smaller, faster.

[weirdami]

If there was a 5TB drive, nobody would be able to back it up. That is, those that even think of such things. Most computer users would just keep piling junk on the drive and never even thinking they need to back up or do any sort of Spring cleaning because there is so much space. One day, the drive will fail and they will loose 20 years of data. You think you were mad when your 20 gig drive died? When the 5TB drives come out, you better put the actuaries on notice, because suicide rates will spike. :-)

[Trev]

Most large companies use offsite disk-based backup systems or a mirror of their production environment at a recovery site. Modern tapes can store a *lot* of data, but you have to factor in restore times.

Even a 400 GB drive isn't very practical. In anything other than a desktop environment, you'll probably want more than one spindle working on your data. Seven to a hundred or more spindles (sometimes thousands) is common for SCSI subsystems, and fiber channel subsystems can scale way beyond that.

So, unless the interface technologies continue to advance as well, increased capacity is really only helping PC manufacturers, game players, and DVD rippers. ;-)

Trev

[X-ray]

The serial ATA idea is good. That is what I have done, with two 200GB drives. Although I don't use the mirror raid, I use stripe for fast access because I have large files to work with: 500mb to 800mb scans of X-rays in some cases.
Really, 400gb striped should be okay for most people. Then I have a 140gb external firewire backup drive, and two internal IDE 120gb drives for the system. Lastly there is a 1gb SCSI external drive that was setup as FAT95 so it could be plugged into the A4000T or the PC (but I need to format it agian).
I think it is a good idea not to mix Windoze, Backup, and graphics-currently-being-worked-on files. Hell, I don't even let them sit on the same controller.

[Magic-Merl]

Why would any company want to sell a 5TB drive, other than being a specialist piece of kit, at this point when the manufacturers can drip feed us with 50/100GB upgrades and sell alot of drives (to us morons that keep ugrading, myself included) before they actually reach 5TB.

Maybe hard drive capacity should be restrained for a while.  Tell bill gates that we are reaching the TB breakthrough barrier and his next OS will attain the banner of "bloatware"

Not a single one of us, that use Amiga's, would consider 80GB to be massive, by any means.  Maybe when you consider an individuals storage needs (for movies etc) then there would be a requirement.

[Tahoe]

One of the manufacturers have a 500GB drive out and have announced a 1TB one.
As far as the backup is concerned, times you could use one tape for a single backup is long past. Backing up tb of data is now usually done on SDLT or LTO tapes. LTO drives get apr. 800GB on one tape using compression, on average you get between 400 and 600GB on a tape.

High volume user (like at our work) we use several (4) of these drives in a robot. But believe me, these machines cost more then my car!

edit: my windoze machine with aprx. 1GB of storage I backup on my DLT drive (40/80GB). That means swapping more tapes then I ever needed to swap floppy's in my miggy
And that is just my PC. Backup my firewall takes one tape, backup my exchange server takes 3 to 4...

[florida320]

...Thanks for all the feedback.

[asian1]

Hi
There is a consortium of Holograhpic Versatile Disk in Japan, with 1 TB storage standard.

http://www.optware.co.jp/english/what_050203.html

There is a company that promise 1 TB Store C3D, but failed.

See also:

http://www.bbcworld.com/content/template_clickonline.asp?pageid=666&co_pageid=3

>Backup
There is a 200 GB removable storage from InPhase:

http://www.inphase-tech.com/products/tapestrydrive/index.html

>LTO

See the new 1.6 TB standard, with speed of 240 MB/s:

http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/sDefinition/0,,sid5_gci347603,00.html

If Seagate / Maxtor / WD want to create full height 5.25 Inch or 8 Inch 1 TB drive, they can create it with present technology.

[HopperJF]

I'm quite sure that there are already 4Tb drives around, just very hard to get hold of and mostly used for industries

[adolescent]

HopperJF wrote:
I'm quite sure that there are already 4Tb drives around, just very hard to get hold of and mostly used for industries

I doubt this.  Care to offer any shred of proof?

[Sparky]

Awww .. your disk not big enough for you ? :-)

Have a look at this little toy :

http://www.hds.com/products_services/universal_storage_platform/

32Petabytes of storage ... mmmmm ... even I've not played with that much storage before :-)  Max I've been running so far (2 years ago) was 240Tb (I think the company has over a petabyte now though)

One thing you need to realise about "big" disks, is you need to have someway to back them up ... so it means spending money on supporting infrastructure ... now before people jump up saying "Well RAID them then!", great that gives you a bit of redundancy, but even a 72Gb drive can take an hour to rebuild if it's full and on a live system, a 5Tb disk would be awful to work with in my job.

For online storage devices most sensible companies these days use 72GB and 144Gb disks, for near-line storage (archive to slower disk ie. IDE/ATA) they'll use the bigger spindles as recovery time is not so critical.