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Hitachi paves the way to larger HDDs
Author: Phil CogarPublished: 15th October 2007
A 4TB drive could be in your computer soon. But how long will it take for 1PB of storage?
Increasing areal density is becoming increasingly problematic but the problem doesn't seem to rely on the the density itself, but rather the ability to read it. Current tunnel magnetoresistance heads may not be reliable for use past the 500Gbit per square inch density mark. By shrinking TMR heads, electrical resistance and noise is generated which may cause reliability and performance issues.
This is where Hitachi's latest head technology comes into play. The company is planning to implement a new technology, called Current Perpendicular-to-the-Plane Giant Magneto-Resistive (CPP-GMR) heads, in order to overcome the issue. CPP-GMR heads use a conductor between two magnetic layers and a perpendicular current instead of an insulator and parallel current like in TMR heads. This allows the heads to be shrunk without succumbing to the electrical resistance problems.
Hitachi plans to implement CPP-GMR heads into HDDs in 2009.
Until the manufacturing cost of solid state HDDs hits a lower point, traditional HDDs will remain a staying point in our everyday lives. Since SSD is a semiconductor technology, the technology simply can't compete with HDDs when it comes to cost-per-bit.
Is that shiny 1TB HDD simply not enough storage space for your needs? For many of you, that seems to be the case. So, can I mark you down for one, two, or three 4TB HDDs? Let many know how many you want over in the forums.
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Comments (28)
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Having had hard drives die on me in the past, a 4tb or even a 1tb drive loss could be rather painfull without some form of a reliable backup solution.
Used in RAID of cause is a different matter, so I would never buy just 1 of these on there own :|
8x4tb in raid 6... yer I could settle for that :)
I suppose if the costs come down then backing up would be less painful one in your rig and one in a file sever everything is copied overnight but right now lossing even 500gb is painful.
I'm looking forward to seeing where they are going with this.
The bigger the drive sizes, the better for us all – just thing about how cheap a 500MB drive will be then!
4tb drives? good god thats a lot of songs/movies/porn/games :D
Ok; data needs will always increase by the minute. I remeber being hyped about my 1.2GB HDD back 12 years ago. Here we are today at 1TB and now 4TB; no supprise. I will never have an issue getting a 4 or 8 or who knows a 1 Petabyte drive down the road.
The problem is, that saving data was easy years ago; but with the onsite of higher data storage. Enterprise level backup solutions will have to make it down to the home market in some way or fashion. Especially a coast effective solution.
Thanks
but
god imagine how freaking LONG it would take to format the damn thing, be like alright I started formating I will see you in a day or two lol and if that drive ever crashed your screwed....
seriously, this means a LOT of space...and the technology looks like it comes straght from the Nobel Prize winner(s)...(French, yay! and German)
Hurray for Science ! (and Physics that enable us to store a lot of ...uh...media on our HDD !
It's actually a good point.They will need to find a way to format the drives faster than the regular technique...Because even a quick format will take FOREVER
in your case hentai :p..... but anyway that is a *hit load of pron.......
edit: imagine the read speeds on those.....
As the density will have increased, the speed of the drive will be higher, but even then a full format could take like 2 hours
Yeah I have 2 160Gb Hitatchis that are still running strong after over 2 years. As I remember the "Deathstars" were one particular drive model, not the whole line.
But hot damn, 4Tb, I dont think every DVD movie, mp3 and program in my entire house would take up that much space...yet :D
Yeah, the 160's in particular. Nice quiet fast drives, and they stay cool too. In fact, just got another one in the post today in fact for yet another build!
The "Deathstar" thing was annoying because many started crying wolf over anything with a Hitachi logo on it, it seemed like. Come on, like WD and Seagate haven't made any lemons before. Don't even get me started on Maxtor. :)
lol. Worth a try though!
My gaming comp has 2x 320GB WD HDD in raid 0 , 4GB gigabyte iram but soon i will be upgrading it to 2x 150GB WD rapotor.
That's large enough for me. But without speed increment, searching or detecting bad sector in such a giant monster would be too long (or even impossible without certain patient)
I'm not looking forward to backing up 4 TB of data on another 4 TB drive at 105 MB/s.
What ever happened to the "hybrid" hard drives everyone was all hyped up about? What about faster spindle speeds? Seemed to work for Western Digital...
I know business that use a lot of drives, this will now give them the opportunity to have less drives on their systems.
I guess in a way, its good because one will use less power and less heat will be generated from say, one 1TR drive as appose to using say 4x 250MB drives (just an example).
Nowadays, its very common to have digital pictures on your PC averaging 5~6MB each.
I have a friend with a 500Gig HDD full of MP3, music video and very-high quality digital pictures.
Yes, 4TR is huge, agreed, but for big business, 4TR is simply just not enough.
Now 1PB that will be interesting, hopefully it will not be on a spinning drive with limited transfer rates.
;)