Seagate says: 300TB drives by the year 2010

THIS WILL ROCKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKK !!! :( :( :(

Man I fill 300 Gb only !!! and 200 Gb free !!! and those Talking about 300T !!! LOL I will Keep My talk With 500 GB

Thanks for news Waiting for drop this harddisk drive to 10 $

Good luck , CK

That would be fantastic for media storage that isn't mission critical.
I currently regularly fill my 500GB of drives with ease (photos, DV tapes, music, Games), though as already stated the reliability of these drives would be of great concern.

Well I have 2 250GB drives and they are both full (Less than 5GB each)
I have a large DVD collection and only ever use them once, to put them on the Hard drive.

Surely this and the popularity of downloadable material (alongside broadband speed increases) will completely negate the need for HD-DVD and Blu-Ray?

By 2010 solid state devices will also be much bigger, affordable and much more versatile.

Sounds great, I must admit.

But I would've hoped by 2010 we wouldn't be focusing so much on the clunky mechanisms of spinning discs to record/read data. I would've thought by then new tech flash memory would be the drive/focus... obviously with significantly higher storage capacities and retention/stability periods.

I agree with the general concensus... By 2010 I hope there's a better and more reliable system of storing data.

bloody hell, backups are going to be a total pain, even with next gen optical backup media.

Will they come with porn?

Originally Posted by DougEdey
Will they come with porn?

surely 300TB is porn!

I could do with the space. I currently have 3 x 120gb drives and 1 x 80gb. Im all outaspace. 1 x 120gb drive is used for my TV recordings from my PVR card. The other 2 120gb drives are used for my video editing. I drive for the video and the other drive a backup of the video. 1 tape from my camera takes up 15gb so its only 8 tapes i cant fit on the 120gb and leaves no room for the editing.

That reminds me I just finished a wedding DVd so that will free up 60GB for now. :)

Originally Posted by DougEdey
Will they come with porn?

Why else would you need 300TB?

Anybody got numbers of read/write? 3Gbit/s seems a little weak. :)

Originally Posted by rupbert
Surely this and the popularity of downloadable material (alongside broadband speed increases) will completely negate the need for HD-DVD and Blu-Ray?

What broadband connection do you mean? Fastest connection I know of is this:

http://www.siemens.com/index.jsp?sdc_p=cfi1426061lmo1426061ps5uz1&sdc_bcpath=1327899.s_5%2C%3A1426061.s_5%2C&sdc_sid=33642822358&

And 107 Gbit/s is damn fast IMO.

Wow, 300TB. Just 1 TB would be ok in my books, I've got 280GB full and I'm constantly burning DVDs just to get stuff off the harddrive. Qaudrupling that space would be great but I think it would be largely unused... Then again, three years ago I said I couldn't imagine myself filling up 200GB of space and look at me now

I want 5, so I can have a petabit.

I'll believe this when I see it in front of me. Every few years we hear about some new storage technique which is going to massively increase storage to near godlike levels. A while back it was holographic("which could be with us by 2007") or perpendicular being talked of as if it would take us to a handfull of terrabytes right of the mark(it's done no such thing).

'tis a nice dream, but I simple don't believe it. The upside is that disks are pretty much growing in size faster than the vast majority of users need them to.

The funny thing is the more space you have available, the more you fill it up. I
t's good to know how press the Del button sometimes...

I have a 40 gb at home, and it is also the system disk, and i manage to download and have movies on it...so 300TB is good, but you'd better have a good sorting method, OR a good search engine !

Seems like an overkill imo, and I can't see a use for it. May be useful in the corporate world, but for home users it's just stupid.

I wish they'd focus more on non-magnetic storage - HDD's are so unreliable...

I'm looking foward to this, so that you can get a 160GB or 320 real cheap (pence!) I use only 20GB on my Mac, but that is probably cus I don't have any games and any of the software i need. lol

I'm well past the 2Tb barrier in terms of use now with almost 2.5Tb full.

Originally Posted by spazmochad
I'm well past the 2Tb barrier in terms of use now with almost 2.5Tb full.

Which has relevence to this thread how? :|

What broadband connection do you mean?

I'm basing my assumption on current speeds, which for me is 10Mb.

This year NTL are due to go 25Mb along with Blueyonder and various ADSL providers, so I'm assuming in 2010 there will be the notion of 50Mb connections.

On my 10Mb I can download a 5Gb retail quality dvdr in just over an hour, so in several years time I'd expect it to complete in 15 minutes or so...

Originally Posted by specofdust
Which has relevence to this thread how? :|

I think highlighting the need for bigger hardisk sizes is not altogether irrelevant?

I think highlighting the need for bigger hardisk sizes is not altogether irrelevant?

But it didn't really even do that did it? I'm not even sure you're correct. Right now there really is very little need for bigger disks. The vast majority of consumers could easily be satisfied by a few hundred gigs for their holiday photos on their digicam and the few hundred mp3's they've downloaded.

And those (very very few, compared with the gen.pop) of us who're on a mission to download the entire interweb just RAID or shove a whole load of disks in there and get on with it. Bigger drives really aren't that neccesary at all right now. Just desirable.

Originally Posted by specofdust
But it didn't really even do that did it? I'm not even sure you're correct. Right now there really is very little need for bigger disks. The vast majority of consumers could easily be satisfied by a few hundred gigs for their holiday photos on their digicam and the few hundred mp3's they've downloaded.

And those (very very few, compared with the gen.pop) of us who're on a mission to download the entire interweb just RAID or shove a whole load of disks in there and get on with it. Bigger drives really aren't that neccesary at all right now. Just desirable.

I agree they arn't neccesary for the vast majority, however it's always the small minority of enthusiasts who push things forward in technology.

In a couple of years time though when HD material really hits it's commercial target, 'gen.pop' as you put it there will be a need for much larger storage space.

And personally my case can only accommodate two hardisks due to the watercooling setup, so I'm actually having to buy pretty expensive £500+ external NAS box to store all of my music and films on...

The question is...how much will they cost? Though, by 2010, I'd imagine most games would be at least 15GB+ each. Hell, Medieval 2: Total War is already 9GB.

Originally Posted by Duste
The question is...how much will they cost?

I think solid state memory is going to become the standard, so mechanical storage would have to remain competitively priced...

Never underestimate human ability to generate data, and in particular horde it. Think about all the books, paper, CDs, DVDs, games, software, video tapes, audio tapes, PC video, MP3s, pictures, text documents, PVRs, etc... in your collection. Quite a lot of that uses lossy compression to get it on the medium or is limited by the devices it will be used with, but tech moves on at an incredible rate.

300TB may seem a lot, but think about it archiving every bit of data you own and it starts to make sense. I seem to remember it will take about 80 yottabytes (YB), a YB is 1,099,511,627,776 terabytes or a terabyte ^ 2.

speed speed speed.

the only reason i stick to 2x80Gb of Seagates for my Windows is becoz its the fastest for my RAID-0 array. just SATA2 just aint cutting it anymore.

transferring a couple gig of movies over SATA2 isnt fun. when 300TB drives (which im sure will be available. what do u think the max capacity of drives 5 years back?) arrives, games, movies, files n whatnot will be bigger. even the operating systems. and moving them across SATA2 will be a pain.

come out with SATA4 or whatever, or make cheap SCSI outof it, and ill get one of those terras...

afterall, i got 2x250+ 1x320 + 1x160 + 2x80Gb (RAID) almost full and now watching for more drives but i coudlnt get them coz i cant fit anymore drive into my small HTPC case..... bigger capacity drive will make sense, no?

Originally Posted by specofdust
I'll believe this when I see it in front of me. Every few years we hear about some new storage technique which is going to massively increase storage to near godlike levels. A while back it was holographic("which could be with us by 2007") or perpendicular being talked of as if it would take us to a handfull of terrabytes right of the mark(it's done no such thing).

'tis a nice dream, but I simple don't believe it. The upside is that disks are pretty much growing in size faster than the vast majority of users need them to.

Actualy you can buy cartrige holographic drives they store about 300gb per discs and are marketed at large companies and cost about £100,000 per drive.

Some dumb Will use this to recopy the same files on the harddisk lol !!!

I cant get why they will make 300TB maube for the central world server !!!

also on 2010 harddisk will be old , there some thing new im sure !!

Thanks . CK

Well, I've got 7.5 TB online now in my self-built media server, but I'm in the video production business and therefore have need for a ton of storage.

However, on this article, as someone who has followed and participated in the storage industry for about 15 years, I have two thoughts:

1. The timetable is too tight. While the capacity will get there, it won't be there in 3 years. Even if technically possible, the market demand won't be there yet. Smart companies like Seagate don't bring products to market until there is sufficient demand. They don't just throw products at the market willy-nilly...they are in business to make money and the cash cow must be milked with incremental upgrades.

2. Just as with the numerous 750GB drives I buy today, that are readily available, they may as well plan on selling these in 2-packs. Once you get above the 1 terabyte level with online storage, your list of available options for fast, cost-effective backup gets really short. Plan on keeping hard-drive based backups of your stuff. Whether you keep the backup drive(s) 'online' or 'offline' will depends on your situation.

Originally Posted by careyd
Well, I've got 7.5 TB online now in my self-built media server, but I'm in the video production business and therefore have need for a ton of storage.

However, on this article, as someone who has followed and participated in the storage industry for about 15 years, I have two thoughts:

1. The timetable is too tight. While the capacity will get there, it won't be there in 3 years. Even if technically possible, the market demand won't be there yet. Smart companies like Seagate don't bring products to market until there is sufficient demand. They don't just throw products at the market willy-nilly...they are in business to make money and the cash cow must be milked with incremental upgrades.

2. Just as with the numerous 750GB drives I buy today, that are readily available, they may as well plan on selling these in 2-packs. Once you get above the 1 terabyte level with online storage, your list of available options for fast, cost-effective backup gets really short. Plan on keeping hard-drive based backups of your stuff. Whether you keep the backup drive(s) 'online' or 'offline' will depends on your situation.

Man I Work video production business I cant see that I need more than 100Gb When I'm working After I complete the ( part ) or the project I copy it to 8.5 GB DVD and clean my space to be ready for anther ( part ) or work !

Of course not Movie production !!! Because I saw there studios and I worked with them they use a KICK ASS server with 5 TB for each Movie !!

This Just form My point !! ;) , Thanks , CK

Tbh, i can see these 300Tb drives becoming literally storage drives.
Which smaller, faster, drives being used for the OS.

Originally Posted by Kipman725
Actualy you can buy cartrige holographic drives they store about 300gb per discs and are marketed at large companies and cost about £100,000 per drive.

Whatever, we were told of usable optical discs for all, mainstream market type jazz. My point is that, these technologies get people excited and they talk about how great it could all be, but frequently we don't see what they envisage.

Originally Posted by Redbeaver
speed speed speed.

the only reason i stick to 2x80Gb of Seagates for my Windows is becoz its the fastest for my RAID-0 array. just SATA2 just aint cutting it anymore.

transferring a couple gig of movies over SATA2 isnt fun. when 300TB drives (which im sure will be available. what do u think the max capacity of drives 5 years back?) arrives, games, movies, files n whatnot will be bigger. even the operating systems. and moving them across SATA2 will be a pain.

come out with SATA4 or whatever, or make cheap SCSI outof it, and ill get one of those terras...

Umm, what? You're using 7200.9's which as far as I know aren't SCSI drives, and even if they are they're comparatively very slow against almost all other SCSI. Why on earth do you think SATA 2 "aint cutting it anymore"? It's 300MB/s! 3-4 times more data can go through there than any disk you stick in there is going to produce.

As for the idea that 2x80GB 7200.9's would be faster then a couple of modern WD or Samsung T series 500's, you need to start doing some reading if you reckon it's so, because modern drives continue to improve on bandwidth and those things ain't gonna be coming close to big perpendicular drives.

Originally Posted by Seagate
"Uses lasers to momentarily heat the disk surface..."

How much hotter will these run?

I suspect these will be hotter & require more power but if not then I'd like to see drive sizes shrink so laptop size drives become the standard.

I'm still waiting for the 1~tb drives to come out, to me thats a technical land mark. The one thing that still gets me is the way they still count 1000 instead of 1024.

Also dont forget with great power comes great responsibility, what file system would be able to keep up with that kind of drive? Fragmentation would be a massive problem, well with ntfs anyways.

Another thing i want to see, which this massive amount of storage being available is more IPTV style on demand systems like the xbox live film market having the content at your fingertips with no format war crap to deal with, and with higher bandwith broadband becoming the norm HD content isnt that unrealistic.

Originally Posted by Sord_Fish
Another thing i want to see, which this massive amount of storage being available is more IPTV style on demand systems like the xbox live film market having the content at your fingertips with no format war crap to deal with, and with higher bandwith broadband becoming the norm HD content isnt that unrealistic.

You've touched on something there. What will drive massive storage increases in the mainstream market is media storage...specifically, HD video storage. Reliable bandwidth for on-demand HD movies is a pretty finite quantity, and will remain so for some time, so the content industry is going to be looking for ways to deliver you content that can be cached at your local drive, and then streamed to your display device. More people are going to embrace the concept of home media servers that begin to integrate all media and this will also drive demand for more storage.

Higher quality/less compressed forms of HD video delivery will be possible only once both the bandwidth and storage capacity are there.

Along this continuum (which will evolve for the next 10 years or more), I see 2007 being the year that DRM grows up and gets real. Before you get too excited... much to our chagrin, DRM will not go away, but it WILL, however, start to move to more reasonable levels. The music industry seems to be moving in this direction (DRM free downloads for a higher price) sooner than the movie industry, but they've been generally late on all things digital....

I think history will look back at the failed launch of the ZUNE as the tipping point where consumers rejected oppressive DRM in such a dramatic way that it actually sent a strong-enough message to the content industry to reform themselves, and it may actually start a movement in that direction.

Of course, none of us will really ever get what we really want (DRM free everything)...just more 'reasonable' terms is what will result.

Anyway, back to storage: all this content needs to be stored, and this will drive the demand for more,bigger hard drives. Oh, and faster home networking.

Get ready for week-long defragging sessions, you'll have to schedule them for the same time as your holiday plans!

Originally Posted by careyd
Of course, none of us will really ever get what we really want

Except that is, for the hundreds of millions who choose to take what they want on their own terms.

I'm sick of the increases in capacity. Yes I can always dump more recordings from Media Center or download more through torrents, but current Hard Drives are so behind the technology that surrounds them. You know what, I'm sick of every HDD dying after 4 years of everyday usage. I'm sick of having to buy almost double the amount of storage I need just for backups. Increase the goddamn speed, and make them more reliable. Then go continue increasing the size.

And I feel pathetic, that broken HDD's and huge backup HDD's just drive the market. Companies make money of your drives failing and breaking, and that is so fuc*** up.

Hard Drive is probably the most important component of a computer, yet it seems to be most outdated.

[cries and runs outside in order to ignore Windows Disk not formatted error of his 240GB photo/video HDD]

I'd reckon they'd get about 100Tb by 2010. What I like though is that flash memory keeps getting faster and it's capacity sits about 100 times less than HDD capacity pound for pound how about a few 1Tb flash drives in your pooter?

Solid State is what I reckon most people like us (enthusiasts) will be drooling over while joe public will be showing off their 100Tb Mech-Clunk-ical drives and screaming when they lose all their data.

Originally Posted by Sord_Fish
I'm still waiting for the 1~tb drives to come out, to me thats a technical land mark. The one thing that still gets me is the way they still count 1000 instead of 1024.

That's because kilo is 1000 while kibi is 1024.
Same for all other suffixes.

WOW 300TB's :O
I only filled about half my HD.
But thats technogly it keeps getting better and better for us :)

that is a lot of pr0n..... some people will go dry it this keeps up :p
i am waiting for more reliable mechanisms for hard drives....

I hope my math is right on this....but, according to the Wired News article it's "300 terabits of information" -- TeraBITS, not teraBYTES...so it's "Only" a 37 TeraByte drive by 2010.

Allow for some over-estimation by Seagate's marketing, and say that in 2011 these things are as "Main-stream" as Seagate's current 750GB offering is today, and it's not really such a huge jump. That's only a 50x increase in storage over 4-5 years. The jump is equivalent to the jump from 15GB to 750GB...which happened over around 6-7 years.

In other words, picture yourself back in late 1999 saying "what on earth could I do with 15GB," then look at where you are today operating with hundreds of Gigabytes. Basically, Seagate is banking on the same sort of increase happening over the next ~5 years.

OMG I WANT THIS SOOOO BADD

Originally Posted by Ramble
That's because kilo is 1000 while kibi is 1024.
Same for all other suffixes.

However, computers use kilo and similar suffixes to represent binary units, not decimal units.

Originally Posted by specofdust
Which has relevence to this thread how?

Observe:

Originally Posted by Article
Do you look forward to the days of multi-terabyte drives, or are you struggling to fill 160GB even now? Let us know your thoughts over in the forums.

and to think im buying a 300gb drive in the next couple of days

Originally Posted by Aankhen
Observe

Touché - blame for pointless statements duly shifted to bit-tech :p

Originally Posted by specofdust
But it didn't really even do that did it? I'm not even sure you're correct. Right now there really is very little need for bigger disks. The vast majority of consumers could easily be satisfied by a few hundred gigs for their holiday photos on their digicam and the few hundred mp3's they've downloaded.

And those (very very few, compared with the gen.pop) of us who're on a mission to download the entire interweb just RAID or shove a whole load of disks in there and get on with it. Bigger drives really aren't that neccesary at all right now. Just desirable.

True to some extent, but again, the more you have, the more you want. Just a few years ago, 10-20 GB would have been satisfactory and was more than anybody could ever use. I remember an early computer I had (a raging P1 with 3-6 GB) had so much space, I couldn't even fill it.

Of course, content is changing. Instead of 14kb Word Documents, we have 60gb video projects. With digital camera makers insisting on pursing the megapixel race (albiet with a neglect for image quality), that drive space fills fast when you shoot a few thousand photos at 6 MB each.

It's only going to get worse as computer games take up more disk space than a single DVD, programs and operating systems start eating up more space, and HD rolls along into the standard mainstream.

And with the increase in capacity and bandwidth you never know, we might see lossless audio codecs becoming the norm - audiophiles of the world rejoice! :p

Originally Posted by specofdust
Touché - blame for pointless statements duly shifted to bit-tech :p

Stand clear!

Blame transfer commencing…
Blame transfer now in progress. Please do not switch off your planet or unplug the collective unconsciousness while blame is being transferred.
Blame transfer completed successfully, have a nice day. :D

Wow... I haven't filled 80GB yet.. I'm trying but still, 300TB

I'd certainly like that, imagine the amount of depth games could have! We're talking 150+ levels of CoD!

man it be nice to have that wo what ever the case 37 TB or 300 TB i can fill it easaly. I have 2TB of dvd stored now on my 5 750gb drives. I swear if I can just have one 10 Tb and another for back up in a fire safe then it would make things easier. Kudus for Seagate. As far as porn you watch an erase who keeps it. Man go out people and meet women. LOL

Originally Posted by riggs
Seems like an overkill imo, and I can't see a use for it. May be useful in the corporate world, but for home users it's just stupid.

I wish they'd focus more on non-magnetic storage - HDD's are so unreliable...

Amen to that!!!
I can't see myself ever needing more than 500GB of space even if I burned, copied, ripped, and hoarded everything I could find and stored it all uncompressed, let alone even one Terabyte. They need to start making the technology faster, not bigger! :(

Originally Posted by Fod
bloody hell, backups are going to be a total pain, even with next gen optical backup media.

I'd say nightly replication to a separate drive is a better choice most of the time. Optical media can die (cheap media can do so pretty quickly - I've heard mere weeks in some extreme cases) just like hard drives can, but there are a great number of ways to make a CD or DVD (or HD/BD) useless, where hard drives often have warning signs.

But in any case, I'd love for this. It'll fit in my case right next to my MRAM from 2004 which is ten times faster than DRAM and non-volatile with a higher capacity than ever.

I've got over a terabyte and I'm always shuffling around stuff to try and free up more space (a hazard of ripping all your movies to lossless .avi files), but I won't believe this until I see it. And FFS, existing high-capacity storage better start coming down in price soon - the sweet spot around 320GB (last I checked) is just too cheap relative to the 500 and 750GB drives, even though I'm at the physical limit of how many drives I can fit in my fileserver and need as much capacity per drive as possible. If the 750GB drives would come down about $100 so they were at least CLOSE to the $/GB of the ~320GB models, my server would soon be enjoying three terabytes.

Originally Posted by Generic42
I'd certainly like that, imagine the amount of depth games could have! We're talking 150+ levels of CoD!

Erm.. no. We're talking more like EA Sports Madden 1 Jan - 8 Jan 2010 that still costs full price and you're expected to buy it two dozen times a year.

I am a bit sceptic about the involving laser. As most of you will know, lasers wear out over time. so what if the laser gets out of business, you proberly get a 36TB Read only drive.

I've decided I would get two (maybe not quite as big as 300Tb) in mirrored Raid and use it as archive space, ie. write once then read only (to prevent massive fragmentation) While I use a Solid state drive for OS(s), programs, working files and temporary download space.

Originally Posted by [USRF]Obiwan
I am a bit sceptic about the involving laser. As most of you will know, lasers wear out over time. so what if the laser gets out of business, you proberly get a 36TB Read only drive.

I had a a 40Gb read only drive once on my raid.... I didn't cool it properly

this is great but what Im thinking is more for laptops, we can finally get some decent size laptop hdds ^^ also the fact is how much will such a drive cost, I need 3tb now as it is but I wonder if any alternative forms of data storage will be created, hopefully something similar to the human brain which could make it endless :)

This level of storage seems to be a lil pointless, there was some artical saying that you could record the entire of a persons interactions on 50Tb scale. It does make you wonder what all the space will be used for?!?
That said I have 620Gb of storage space, and intend something on the Tb level for my next build, or a 0+1 RAID array.
Jaz_knos

32Gigs of solid state memory should cost around $600 according to Sandisk.

http://www.sandisk.com/Oem/Default.aspx?CatID=1478

Corsair's 16GB USB sticks just launched at $300 so that makes sense. Might cost a bit extra to set it up with a SATA interface though?

Originally Posted by HourBeforeDawn
this is great but what Im thinking is more for laptops, we can finally get some decent size laptop hdds ^^ also the fact is how much will such a drive cost, I need 3tb now as it is but I wonder if any alternative forms of data storage will be created, hopefully something similar to the human brain which could make it endless :)

I'd get so paranoid about losing a portable device with that much data on it.

Originally Posted by Cheap Mod Wannabe
32Gigs of solid state memory should cost around $600 according to Sandisk.

I'd love one in my lappy, Shame they don't have a SATA2 version for Desktop.

Originally Posted by Kipman725
Actualy you can buy cartrige holographic drives they store about 300gb per discs and are marketed at large companies and cost about £100,000 per drive.

I thought it was only 15K $ per drive, and the cartridges are a couple of hundred...

Originally Posted by JazX101
This level of storage seems to be a lil pointless

It makes an awful lot of sense from an enterprise perspective. Would be ideal for low performance mass storage. 50 Petabytes of redundant storage in a single rack is nothing to sniff at.

But... if there are drives even 1/10 that size available in 3 years I'll eat not only my hat but the hat of everyone on this forum. It just isn't going to happen. Back as far as 8 years ago we were supposed to all be using multi TB holographic drives, which are as yet non-existent.

Originally Posted by Mister_Tad
It makes an awful lot of sense from an enterprise perspective. Would be ideal for low performance mass storage. 50 Petabytes of redundant storage in a single rack is nothing to sniff at. Though if there are drives even 1/10 that size available in 3 years I'll eat not only my hat but the hat of everyone on this forum. It just isn't going to happen.

My hats a 10 gallon texas jobbie.

Gladly eaten if it means we get a 300TB drive ;)

I've got a WWII army helmet knocking about the place somewhere... come on 300TB drives! :p

But thats a helmet not a hat. What condiments are you going to have with your feast of hats if they do make 30TB drives?

Perhaps some Lea & Perrins, accompanied with select Dave's pepper sauces

But regardless, lets try to get back on topic, shall we? ;)

Hey i am Auron i cant wait until the 300tb comes out,Seeing as though i am a serious gamer right now my 1tb hd is filled full of games and any game you chuck at me i will play then decrypt and reprogram games that are possible of doing that and then play them again. thanks Auron.