Large Drives

[LunarMist]

When will larger hard drives be produced, for example 1.5TB? Is there any news?

 

[ddrueding]

I haven't heard anything. All the news of late is in larger 2.5" drives and SSD stuff.

 

[jtr1962]

Probably sometime this year according to this. A lot depends upon how many people actually have a need for something that huge. My guess is not many. Actually, 640GB should be enough for anybody. ;-)

Personally, I'd rather see research focusing on making 500GB $100 solid-state drives than super-sized magnetic ones.

 

[Tannin]

I would benefit significantly by the availability of bigger drives. My desktop system has a motley assortment of drives at present and it's quite a pain managing all those seperate volumes - mostly 400 and 500GB units at present.

And no, I am not interested in buggerising about with RAID and spanned volumes or any of that other crap. Two reasons: (a) simple systems are good, solid, reliable systems, and my data matters; (b) I don't have the time or the interest to fark about setting up a large, robust, spanned volume system; I just want to store a lot of data the cheapest, most reliable, easiest way, and that is to use about 10 400 and 500GB Samsung drives, each drive is a single NTFS volume, each of the 5 or so primary volumes has an off-line, off-site mirror which I perform manually, not very often because most of the data doesn't change a lot. Often, it is sufficient to make the backup and the eternal round of capacity upgrades a single operation: e.g., replace a 400GB unit with a new 500, copying the data over to it, and then making the 400 my off-line backup and discarding the older 300GB backup drive.

Nevertheless, it would be more convienient to have a smaller number of drives - say 3 data drives and three backups. 1TB would do that nicely now, but I'll presumably start replacing the 500s with Samsung 750s (or possibly 1TBs) once I've replaced all the 400s with 500s. Yes, you can get those sizes already, but not in Samsung (at least not last time I checked, which was November) and I won't touch any other brand. Also, it doesn't hurt to wait until the price becomes a bit more reasonable and the product has been out long enough to have had the rough edges knocked off it - not that Samsungs ever seem to need that, they hang back a bit and don't release stuff till it's right, in my experience.

But the place where a bigger drive would really help is in the Thinkpad. I'm stuck with an 80GB boot drive and a 160GB data drive at present, and it's just not enough. OK, I could swap the 80 for a 160, but that's the largest size available in PATA, and to use SATA I'd need a new Thinkpad, and if I do that I'll be stuck with a crappola 15.4 inch shallow screen, which I'll hate. So I'm putting that particular evil moment off as long as possible. But when I do finally switch over, I'll want as much storage as possible - 2 x 1TB would be fantastic.

 

[LunarMist]

Tony,
The Samsung F1 (1 TB) has been out since December in the US. I like it and may buy more. However, I read about a firmware problem with some chipsets (not a problem for typical add-in controllers though). Also note that 250GB PATA and 320GB SATA notebook drives are available, and that Samsung is annouced 500GB (presumably SATA only) notebook drives for Q2. We shall see.

Joe,
Even if the largest capacity is not high volume, the increasingly denser drive technology is useful for lowering the cost of the smaller drives, for example 400 and 500GB will become single platter at some time.

 

[udaman]

I would benefit significantly by the availability of bigger drives. My desktop system has a motley assortment of drives at present and it's quite a pain managing all those seperate volumes - mostly 400 and 500GB units at present.

And no, I am not interested in buggerising about with RAID and spanned volumes or any of that other crap. Two reasons: (a) simple systems are good, solid, reliable systems, and my data matters; (b) I don't have the time or the interest to fark about setting up a large, robust, spanned volume system; I just want to store a lot of data the cheapest, most reliable, easiest way, and that is to use about 10 400 and 500GB Samsung drives, each drive is a single NTFS volume, each of the 5 or so primary volumes has an off-line, off-site mirror which I perform manually, not very often because most of the data doesn't change a lot. Often, it is sufficient to make the backup and the eternal round of capacity upgrades a single operation: e.g., replace a 400GB unit with a new 500, copying the data over to it, and then making the 400 my off-line backup and discarding the older 300GB backup drive.

Nevertheless, it would be more convienient to have a smaller number of drives - say 3 data drives and three backups. 1TB would do that nicely now, but I'll presumably start replacing the 500s with Samsung 750s (or possibly 1TBs) once I've replaced all the 400s with 500s. Yes, you can get those sizes already, but not in Samsung (at least not last time I checked, which was November) and I won't touch any other brand. Also, it doesn't hurt to wait until the price becomes a bit more reasonable and the product has been out long enough to have had the rough edges knocked off it - not that Samsungs ever seem to need that, they hang back a bit and don't release stuff till it's right, in my experience.

But the place where a bigger drive would really help is in the Thinkpad. I'm stuck with an 80GB boot drive and a 160GB data drive at present, and it's just not enough. OK, I could swap the 80 for a 160, but that's the largest size available in PATA, and to use SATA I'd need a new Thinkpad, and if I do that I'll be stuck with a crappola 15.4 inch shallow screen, which I'll hate. So I'm putting that particular evil moment off as long as possible. But when I do finally switch over, I'll want as much storage as possible - 2 x 1TB would be fantastic.

Hmm, me thinks those mosquitoes sucked a bit too much blood out of Tannin recently, cause he must have missed some of my posts here on SF, in his woozy state??? Samsung has "announced" March 08 as volume ramp up of the 500GB 2.5in (how many cm is that for Tannin ) 5.4k rpm (now isn't that just silly, keeping time by 60 seconds per minute, why there should be a metric scale, counting by revolutions per units of 100's of time) SATAII drive. When it's actually available at the retail level, your guess is as good as mine

Depending on which Stinkpad you get, you can still get a non-shallow (translation from Oz slang, it's called a "wide-screen" typically 16:10 aspect ratio, but Dell IIRC has already announced a 16:9 ratio laptop, and Samsung has "annouced" but I haven't read any one using it just yet, a higher efficiency, better colors, 16:9 ratio 16in & 18.4? screen, think also a 15.4in) old-school aspect ratio screens. Maybe not downunder, but certainly still listed as an option for the USA.

It will be a very long time before 500GB SSD's are in the price range most here on SF will consider acceptable. However, setting up a large volume of multiple 500GB (512GB) SSD's should prove much more reliable than any HD configuration, even a single 1TB HD. Extra cost may be worth it for that extra data security, along with STR's that leave HD's to dust, couple that with inexpensive Firewire 3200Gbs standard that may make it's debut this year, we have a nice combination for next year...maybe it will appear, maybe not . Recall the USB3.0 standard is still whimpy as far as voltage/current it calls for. FW gives you enough power to run Raid drives for more speed or quicker backup via bus power. Might be handy for Tannin on his birding tours into the backcountry. Monteviña chipsets this summer, couple with next gen. Penryn (not current line up in Santa Rosa) are said to have a TDP of 29w in the T series, as opposed to current 35w TDP, should give slight increase in battery run times along with more efficient laptop DDR3 RAM capability....but probably only LED bl wide-screens available on the stinkpad by then.

 

[jtr1962]

Joe,
Even if the largest capacity is not high volume, the increasingly denser drive technology is useful for lowering the cost of the smaller drives, for example 400 and 500GB will become single platter at some time.

Being that 2-platter drives have always represented the sweet spot in $ per GB, this would mean 800GB to 1 TB drives for about $79 to $99. Now that I've started putting some movies on my computer, I can see how fast hundreds of GB of storage can go. My 200GB drive is roughly half full. At best that's enough space for perhaps 40 hours of video. Let's hope the sub-$100 terabyte drives are out before I need more storage. For now I'm moving the 100 GB second drive in my other machine to my main machine, to be used exclusively for video.

I think a big problem with the higher density platters is that they may not be able to put 3 or 4 platters in a drive without resorting to things like 2-stage heads. So it might just mean cheaper ~1 TB drives rather than larger ones. My money is still on solid-state storage first becoming viable for boot drives, and then finally exceeding magnetic storage in capacity with lower cost per GB. That may not happen for a few years, though.

 

[sechs]

Count me in for the 2.5" bandwagon. I want all of my drives to be small, cool, and quiet. If I hadn't already had a 3.5 250GB drive, I probably would have gotten 200GB 2.5 instead.

Size will come along, but I don't need any more right now. And we all know that most people don't even need 500GB to get around.

 

[Tannin]

Thanks guys, I've been out of the loop since November, haven't seen a pricelist since then. There were Samsung 750GB and (I think) 1GB 3.5 inch drives on the list then, but no stock at that time, I guess they will be ex-stock in Melbourne now.

As for the 500GB 2.5, yes please! I can't use them directly, but what I thought was ample external storage for a 30-day trip - a 120GB PATA and a 250GB SATA external drives - turned out to be too little and I had to buy a 160GB external drive at retail. Iomega branded, too, so I guess that means it contains some dreadfully unreliable POS such as a WD. I was afraid to open it up and look, but anyway, it did the job.

Uda, I'm talking about standard screens, not this shallow screen crap. 16 x 9 and the like is bloody near useless to me. But it's all you can get, certainly in Australia. I'm going to have to travel with an external monitor - even more weight and power consumption.

Sigh.

 

[Mercutio]

Does your Thinkpad have an Ultrabay, Tannin? You can always buy a SATA Ultrabay and stick your large notebook drive in that.

Are there now lots of SFers who have in excess of 5TB of disk space?

 

[ddrueding]

Are there now lots of SFers who have in excess of 5TB of disk space?

Sounds like a poll...

 

[Bozo]

Are there now lots of SFers who have in excess of 5TB of disk space?

Not me. Less than 300GB total for two computers.

Bozo :joker:

 

[Pradeep]

As for the 500GB 2.5, yes please! I can't use them directly, but what I thought was ample external storage for a 30-day trip - a 120GB PATA and a 250GB SATA external drives - turned out to be too little and I had to buy a 160GB external drive at retail. Iomega branded, too, so I guess that means it contains some dreadfully unreliable POS such as a WD. I was afraid to open it up and look, but anyway, it did the job.

I'm looking for a drive to upgrade my PS3. I may go with a 7200rpm (doesn't look like they run any warmer than 5400rpm units), so I can install demos/load levels a tad faster.

 

[Tannin]

Merc, are you saying that the Ultrabays are the same between diffrent generations of Thinkpad - i.e., that I could buy the Ultrabay for the (all SATA) T60 (or etc) and use it in my (all IDE) R52? Must be some pretty fancy electronics there.

 

[Mercutio]

Tannin, I believe they are the same. IBM parts certainly have a history of working between models; I had quite a few parts I shared between T20 and T41 for example.

You can probably check their site to be sure but that bridge chip isn't very big in any case.

 

[LunarMist]

Does your Thinkpad have an Ultrabay, Tannin? You can always buy a SATA Ultrabay and stick your large notebook drive in that.

Are there now lots of SFers who have in excess of 5TB of disk space?

Yeah, almost 3x more.