Seagate 750GB hard drive

[ladyb1998]

http://apnews.excite.com/article/20060426/D8H7G9E07.html

seagate game out with a 750gb hard drive on wednesday. read the article for more info

[ROF]

Wake me when 1TB drives are available in most retail outlets. These 750's are just a blip.

[somebodeez]

Awesome, I'll take one

[Mr. Dweezel]

My biggest is 300 gb. I'd rather have a few of this size instead of
one huge drive. That way I can spread out the failure risk, if that
makes sense.

Maybe this should be moved to the computer forum.

[mike909]

For the hard drive industry, the capacity milestone pegs the biggest, fastest jump in its 50-year history.

Interesting.

[somebodeez]

My biggest is 300 gb. I'd rather have a few of this size instead of
one huge drive. That way I can spread out the failure risk, if that
makes sense.

Good point - I hadn't thought of that.

But on the flipside - I was thinking about how I have to keep the 4 I have now seperated from each other because of heat issues and I was also thinking of space inside of my case ...

[rhegedus]

You could have a holiday while that sucker formats itself!

[Mr. Dweezel]

My biggest is 300 gb. I'd rather have a few of this size instead of
one huge drive. That way I can spread out the failure risk, if that
makes sense.

Good point - I hadn't thought of that.

But on the flipside - I was thinking about how I have to keep the 4 I have now seperated from each other because of heat issues and I was also thinking of space inside of my case ...

You could get external hard drive cases. I use those and they're great! That way you could
also switch the drives from PC to PC.

[ROF]

Most towers today have floor to ceiling storage bays with plenty of space for and between each drive.

[somebodeez]

You could get external hard drive cases. I use those and they're great! That way you could
also switch the drives from PC to PC.

Oh yes I love my externals too - soooooo handy!
I mostly use those to store ISOs I've made from my home movies.

[somebodeez]

Most towers today have floor to ceiling storage bays with plenty of space for and between each drive.

But I love my current tower
(not for practical reasons though - it's got pretty lights on the front that change colors )

[ROF]

Most towers today have floor to ceiling storage bays with plenty of space for and between each drive.

But I love my current tower
(not for practical reasons though - it's got pretty lights on the front that change colors )

Kinda off topic but I know your feelings. I have a tower I bought in the early 90's. I have a few drives in it but no motherboard. It doesn't have a complete compliment of storage bays but it looks very cool and has some funky LEDs on the front. I have them hooked into a switch which when on and music is played the LEDs flash in different preset patterns according to the beat. It's just a storage case with drives I hot plug when data storage/retrieval is needed, but I'd never get rid of it. It's practical, but not really so.

[Faustus]

A 1TB NAS is on the market for about $800 and supports at least a min. of fault protection as long as you are willing to give up a little space. Soon you will be able to get one that actually comes out to 1TB for the price range.

That would be the way to go, besides many of them also have firewalls built in also.

[TBoneit]

My biggest is 300 gb. I'd rather have a few of this size instead of
one huge drive. That way I can spread out the failure risk, if that
makes sense.

Maybe this should be moved to the computer forum.

OTOH three 250Gb drives instead of one 700Gb just increased your chances of losing a drive and lessened your chance of losing all the data.

Hard drives are temp storage devices with finite lives. That being said I have 5 externals all of which are never on at the same time. Last night I had three on and tonight I may have four on moving files around into more or less safe storage until I get them backed up onto DVDs (Source files, Software downloads and their activation keys)

One 80 GB external I only keep all the software I need to reload after one of my periodic reloads + Emails and My Documents backups and such things that I want to restore back to my boot drive


On the case topic I pretty much settled on a Lian Li Aluminum with 12 drive bays and three coling fans and 4 front USb ports. Precision fit easy to work on as the Motherboard is on a rmovable drawer, all the 3.5" drive bays are removable etc.

[Tom Saurus]

It is nice to see some good news when it comes to computing. I remember when my sister got her first computer, a used 386 model with Windows 95. I think it had less than 1GB Hard Drive capacity. Now to think there will soon be hard drives with a capacity 1000 times more than 1 GB. It wasn't all that long ago 1GB was a really big deal.

What is the next step up from the TB level? Once HD Content becomes available even a 1TB drive could get ate up pretty fast.

[ROF]

A 1TB NAS is on the market for about $800 and supports at least a min. of fault protection as long as you are willing to give up a little space. Soon you will be able to get one that actually comes out to 1TB for the price range.

That would be the way to go, besides many of them also have firewalls built in also.

Unfortunately most NAS boxes have multiple drives in them to achieve the 1TB solution. Most of us already have this inside and outside our towers today. I have a NAS and as I said above I also have a drive tower. The NAS is not a single TB drive however it does have 1.2TB of storage capacity and a nice firewall solution built in. What I am waiting for is a single 1TB drive at < .50 per GB cost. I know I have some time to wait which was why I said wake me when we get there.

1GB was a big deal over a decade ago, which when you look at the lifespan of the personal home computer (30 years of computing) that is quite a long time ago when 1GB was considered a big deal. What is a big deal is that in that time hard drives have made miniscule leaps in access times and read/write times. It's still the biggest bottleneck in a computer yet without it a cpu doesn't do much. Capacities have grown but as Rob pointed out, do you have time to sit there and wait for it to complete a format?

[whitejremiah]

What is the next step up from the TB level? Once HD Content becomes available even a 1TB drive could get ate up pretty fast.

next level up is the petrabyte, i believe........we wont see anything like this for probably around ten or fifteen more years, i'd guess........ as for HD content.......well, it still isnt gonna be THAT easy to chalk a 1tb harddrive full..........(maybe once the quad layer discs become available....also this is providing the formats themselves dont completely flop......)

[ROF]

I could fill a terabyte drive today and still have to find a place to store other information. No HD content either.

[TBoneit]

I think I paid around $800 for a 1Gb Western Digital when it first came out. I had it running on a computer that held storage for a Wildcat multiline BBS, then a fairly short while later the internet took off and ,ore or less killed BBS's. When wa sthe last time you saw a support BBS that you could call into for updates and FAQs and such instead of the internet?

Not to mention the price of optical media, I paid hundreds for Mitsumi 1X cdroms and even more for the two 6 disc Pioneer Changers.

[oldandinthe way]

Watch the prices fall. This drive costs Seagate no more to build than the current smaller drives.

The increased size is totally a result of firmware which encodes perpendicularly, instead of horizontally.

[RabidDog]

If hard dd are temporary storage where do you backup your HDD too? DVD for archive/backup are completely impractical when talking even 50-100gb. (time for quad layer blu-ray) This is big news in that its a single drive. I recently upgraded to 300gb +80gb and thought wow I'll never fill this up. 6 weeks later 40% full. HD video jukeboxes will need these AND MORE (as will Vista 2.0).If NAS are RAIDED they can be significantly faster than single drive solutions.
perp encoding is a Major advance (IBMs pixie dust) which is NOT simply due to firmware (at all)

[ROF]

Watch the prices fall. This drive costs Seagate no more to build than the current smaller drives.

The increased size is totally a result of firmware which encodes perpendicularly, instead of horizontally.

Aren't those two statements kind of contradicting one another?

If a new way of storing informarion is developed for increased capacity didn't the company invest some sort of capital in producing the development? Most companies I know of pass this cost of R&D along to the consumer who must have the latest technology before their neighbor does. Prices will fall but when a new technology is added to a product and associated cost is attached to the consumer price tag.

[tug_hill2]

Hello Group, Anyone know the cost of the 750 gb drives???

I usually buy Hard Drives in 'pairs' - one drive goes into the computer, while the other drive is hooked into a HD enclosure - and I copy info from one drive to the secondary one. That way the odds of both drives crashing at the same time is astronomical.


Haven't lost any data since the old days of 40 mb hard drives..! (Yes...! 'mb') First computer was a Packard Bell (don't laugh) 286/8/ mhz with a 16 mhz TURBO mode switch - came with a warning NOT to use Turbo Mode for more than 15 minutes ...!


Doc_B

[akrako1]

Ha.. I think my first 'puter went from 8 to 12 Mhz with the Turbo switch... I don't remember anything about a 15 minute limit tho.. When I finally got a 10MB hardrive, I couldn't fathom ever filling it up... crap, I could put ALL my 5 1/4's onto the one drive! No more switching disks! Then Windows 3.1 happened, and all the sudden, you couldn't run squat off disk... It all comes back to Microsoft...

[ViRaL1]

I'm looking forward to getting my hands on some. 250GB is a pretty significant jump considering the last was from 400GB to 500GB. As far as formatting time goes, this could take up to a full minute to Quick-format NTFS in 2K/XP. This means you can have 2 full Terabytes in a 4-disk NAS with RAID-5. Nexsan's SATAbeast MAID appliance holds up to 42 drives so it can now support up to 31TB in a 4U rackmount enclosure. That ain't bad! I also like that it's a Seagate, so it comes with a 5yr warranty.

[satviewer2000]

I could fill a terabyte drive today and still have to find a place to store other information. No HD content either.

With hi-def movies each around 10GB, you would only be able to hold around 100 HDTV movies on a 1TB drive. Which is not a whole lot.

But hey, I was around when a 720K floppy (a real floppy) was considered to be a "breakthrough". Before then, we had to use tape based drives (on a cassette tape no less).

[Mr. Dweezel]

Before then, we had to use tape based drives (on a cassette tape no less).

My first PC was like that. It was from Radio Shack about 100 years ago!
I think it was called a TRS-80.

It used the cassette player as you mentioned.

I returned the PC to the store but kept the cassette player!

[piano632]

My first "PC" was a Radio Shack TRS-80 Color Computer also. It was pretty good for a game machine in the 80's. I used a cassette recorder to store data at first, then later came the external floppy drives. I still have some 7" floppies from that machine. At least we didn't have to use punch cards!

Seagate is already promising 50Tb per square inch by 2010 using HAMR (Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording).

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1558,1554116,00.asp

[SatStorm]

My first Computer, was a Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48K back in 1982. Later I "upgrade" to a 128K model... I still believe that was the best computer days of my life...
I salute those new 750GB hard drives: I'll buy 3 of them: I'll store all my music videos, all my cartoons and all my porn, put them on LAN Frames and create my own TV station inside my house. I may buy a Hauppauge mediaMVP now...

[Tom Saurus]

piano632: 50TB per square inch, that boggles the mind. The guy who works on my computer was telling me that he thinks movies could be put on something as small as a Smart Card, and we thought that would would be really neat. Now with technology like that one could put an entire TV Series on one teenie weenie hard drive and have room for tons of other stuff. I think he was saying a Memory Stick, maybe not a Smart Card. I think this is fascinating technology.