(technical, computer games) Anyone know WHEN the 1st 1 terrabyte HDD is coming out?

[Edena_of_Neith]

The largest hard drive available at the moment is 200 gigabytes.
I have heard that Maxtor plans to release a 320 gigabyte hard drive early next year.

I consider 1 terrabyte to be a crucial benchmark for numerous reasons, and I believe computer games and home video games will be enormously affected when hard drives reach this size.

The question is: when will they reach this size, and be made available to the public in mass quantities?
Does anyone know?
Some of you might have information, or be in the know on the matter ... I am not in the know.
At least, I am hoping some of you are in the know, and can tell me something on the matter.

I appreciate that it is a matter of how much information you can cram onto 1 square inch of disk space.
Prior to about 1999, it was considered impossible that more than about 40 gigabits could be crammed thus.
With IBM's pixie dust breakthrough, that increased to (according to current thinking) 150 gigabits per square inch.
Now, I believe Toshiba has demonstrated a technology (in the experimental stage still) that can cram 1 terrabit into one square inch of disk space.

So, does anyone have the low down on the matter?

Does anyone know when I can get my hands on a 1 terrabyte hard drive?

 

[Edena_of_Neith]

I think I have just asked a question for which nobody has an answer ...

 

[orbitalfreak]

Just caught a show on TV about 10 minutes ago and big drives were mentioned. Currently, Microsoft has a web archive stored on a Terrabyte HD, and this is the largest in the world (according to the show). The price is about $3,000 per TB, compared to $3 per GB. Projections are that, 10 years down the road, the price will drop by a factor of ten, $300/TB, and $0.30/GB.

 

[Crothian]

So, maybe my little 6 gig HD is a little on the small side?

A quick look around at some computer sites I found 200 gigs to be the biggests.

 

[Femerus the Gnecro]

Just buy several 200gb drives and set up a nice RAID array. It's the same difference.

-F

 

[Edena_of_Neith]

Thanks for the info.

 

[reapersaurus]

WHY would you want a TB drive?!!

It's not the SIZE of the drive that matters... it's the access speed.
You would NOT want 1 TB of data on one drive given current access speeds.

And 5 200 GB HD's in a RAID array is NOT the same difference whatsoever.
RAID is incredibly faster, due to the ability to access all the drives at once, instead of having to spin back and forth, reading the data on the same big HD.

 

[Edena_of_Neith]

Serial ATA will greatly increase access time, from what I am hearing.
And now, a 250 gigabyte hard drive is available, in the magazines, for only $300 dollars U.S..

Why is a 1 terrabyte hard drive important?
Why do I want one?

Well ...

Consider the memory requirements of uncompressed high definition television.
1 gigabyte per minute, or even more, right?
So, the extended version of FOTR, which is 3 1/2 hours long, would take up 210 gigabytes of space on a hard drive, if it was delivered in uncompressed HDTV, and it took up 1 gigabyte per minute.

If a personal video recorder has a 40 gigabyte hard drive, you aren't going to want to buy it, because it cannot record much HDTV.
Now, perhaps with compression, it will record more HDTV, but still not very much - not as much as you would want, no?
You don't record HDTV on your PVR? You record only at VCR quality levels? Well ... soon HDTV will be the standard in television! Perhaps you will want to record the 1080i program in 1080i, and not in 330 lines!

But what if you had a PVR with a 1 terrabyte drive?
Now, you could record 4 FOTR: EEs on it, assuming uncompressed HDTV. 40 hours of compressed HDTV. And maybe 1,000 hours of your typical 330 line NTSC television.
A better bargain for the money, if the 1 terrabyte hard drive costs only $300, like the lesser hard drives before it once did!

And ...

If they can now produce a 1 terrabyte hard drive, they have undoubtedly made technological breakthroughs to get there.
These breakthroughs will allow them to continue to build bigger and better hard drives.
Hard drives will continue to double in capacity every year.
The year after the introduction of the 1 tb hard drive, they will have a 2 tb hard drive. That's 8 FOTR:EE movies, in HDTV, and uncompressed.
The next year, a 4 tb hard drive. 16 FOTR:EE movies, in HDTV, uncompressed.
The next year, an 8 tb hard drive. 32 FOTR:EE movies, in HDTV, uncompressed.
The NEXT year, a 16 tb hard drive. 64 FOTR:EE movies, in HDTV, uncompressed.

There is something to be said for a world in which you can have an entire library - a very large library of hundreds of thousands of books - on the hard drive of your personal computer sitting on your desk.
There is even more to be said about a world where you can have the greater part of Human Knowledge stored in the hard drive of your personal computer.
And you will be able to access most of that knowledge, because there will be an ultra high speed internet for just that purpose.

This does not mean you will be able to pirate information you have not purchased.
This does not mean you will have access to restricted information.
It DOES mean, however, that you will have access to information you could not have hoped to have accessed, without repeated, exhaustive research trips to a major college, digging through the endless rows of books in dusty libraries, spending months searching through a grating array of library cards and information desks, making endless telephone calls and talking with endless secretaries.
How do I know this?
Well ... I know because that is precisely what I had to do, once, to acquire information that now I can find in seconds on the Internet!

Yes, having a PVR with the ability to record 32 or 64 FOTR:EE in HDTV, uncompressed, will be neat. I'm sure a lot of people will buy said PVRs.
But it's the ability to access and store vasts amounts of knowledge, period, that is so important.
I USED the example of uncompressed HDTV BECAUSE it is so very memory intensive - books do not require nearly that much memory to store in a HDD.
If you can store all these uncompressed HDTV films in the hard disk drive of your PVR, what else can you store in hard disk drives?
A lot of good stuff, that's what.

People speak of Virtual Reality. VR simulations, VR games, etc.
Well, it takes memory for VR. And access speed. And CPU speed. And lots of other things, but above all it takes MEMORY.
If you want to explore the Earth, wearing your VR helmet, you are going to need the memory capacity in your system to do it.
When we start talking terrabyte hard drives, perhaps - just perhaps - we will be talking sufficient memory to do things like that!

 

[reapersaurus]

wow.
amazing rant/fantasy.

You missed my point:
I'll rephrase.....

When 1 TB HD's are available, it's a guarantee that 500 GB HD will be more commonplace, and more than 1/2 as expensive.
You could most likely get 5 500 GB HD's for the price of a TB HD.

Now, if the AMOUNT of space is the most important factor, then you would always get multiple smaller HD's, if $$$ are a concern at all.

If the PERFORMANCE of the drives are the most important factor, you would always get the smaller drives, and place them in a RAID configuration, so as to revel in your HDTV goodness.

If the RECOVERY capabilities of the drives are the most important factor, you would choose a fault-tolerant RAID configuration, so if anything happened to all that lovely data, you get recover it without much problem.

^^^^^^

 

[Edena_of_Neith]

I am bringing this (not that old) thread back from page six because ...

LaCie has introduced a 500 gigabyte hard drive.

I saw hard drives jump from 180 to 200 gigabytes.
Then, from 200 to 250 gigabytes.
Then, from 250 to 500 gigabytes, in one giant step.

How things change.

I thought one terabyte hard drives were still several years off when I started this post not so long ago.
Now, it looks like one may be out within months.

Again, how things change.