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

[saduff]

I would like to point that the speed that a 1 TB hdd would have to run to make it effective for more than storage, is far faster than any type of hardware runs now.

Every piece of exsisting hardware would need to be much faster than it is now. Multiple times faster.

I would imagine that when fast effective 1TB hdd become availble to the mass market. Computer hardware as a whole will be different.

Just as an example. My father got a 5200 rpm 60 GB hdd and I got a 7200 rpm 30 GB hdd. My preformence is far better and I can format and reinstall in a quarter of the time he can. Even with a 7200 rpm 60 GB hdd I would still out gun his machine. The time that his computer takes to scan the for data is longer than mine.

 

[Knightcrawler]

Anybody conisder that it won't be a "hard drive" as in magnetic media. There is definitely a move towards optical drives. Less chance of being effected by magnets and such. Right now there working on a blue laser for optical drives that will increase there storage capacity by a factor of 10 and then you can go even further if you get into layering. Which leads into full three dimensional storage. The "sugar cube" that they have been working on for several years now. What it boils down to is that you should be able to store a TB of info on something the size of a sugar cube. With info that size you would need to increase the tranfer speeds by an exponential rate thus optical drives.

 

[jdavis]

I would like to point that the speed that a 1 TB hdd would have to run to make it effective for more than storage, is far faster than any type of hardware runs now.

Every piece of exsisting hardware would need to be much faster than it is now. Multiple times faster.

I would imagine that when fast effective 1TB hdd become availble to the mass market. Computer hardware as a whole will be different.

Just as an example. My father got a 5200 rpm 60 GB hdd and I got a 7200 rpm 30 GB hdd. My preformence is far better and I can format and reinstall in a quarter of the time he can. Even with a 7200 rpm 60 GB hdd I would still out gun his machine. The time that his computer takes to scan the for data is longer than mine.

Without a doubt, it's the same as saying a sports car can drive 30 miles before a regular car can drive 60. The bigger drives get the faster they have to run just to stay competitive. Formating a larger drive will always take more time regardless, but I have old 1 gig ATA 33 drives that are slower than a 60 gig ultra ATA 133 drive in every way but the formatting. My five year old car is considered very nice and modern, a five year old computer is considered a doorstop. By the time we get a terabyte HD I'm sure the whole industry will have changed.

Where I see the Terabyte HD comming into it's own is in the area of video recording. A hard drive of that size could really bring a device like the TIVO into the mainstream, and could bring the idea of a home entertainment center computer to the general masses. It would be huge for the specialty computer product buisness.

 

[eldoen]

Well, won't go into the how I knows just to say that I work in the industry.

But from info that I have read, 1 and 2 terabyte drives should be a reality in 2004.

But lets do a run down of the computer industry over the next 2 to 3 years.

PCI express will be out in mid to late 2003. which will take the PCI bus speed to new areas. Unfortantly I don't think it will be until version 2. that a real gain will be seen. But a 1 x path is 2.1 gb/s and a 16 x bath is something like 32 gb/s the 16x path will replace agp 8x technologies.

Sata 1 (at 150 MB/s) is out now. Sata II phase one is or currently will be released which will bring in some newer technologies that the enterprises need. but in 2004 sata II phase 2 with the speed increase and more than likely the Serial Attached Scsi specs will be alligned. we will be at 300 MB/s

Considering that most drives made today barely can use the 66 MB/s spec it will be interesting to see what hard drive manus do to actually start using that additional bandwidth provided to them. As a for sure it will need to have that bandwidth for the 1 and 2 terabyte drives.

Now comes the interesting issue. Win 32 can only support up to 2.2 terabytes on a single drive with 512 byte sectors. So that leads us to 64 bit Systems

Yes I agree that the PC will be radically changing in the coming years. PCI Express allows for a radical design change to occur because the bus can be up to 3 meters away from the cpu.

Sata and SAS introduce new concepts for Drive connections. and the coming PCI bus change over and other technologies that it appears that the industry will agree on up front instead of the many different busses during the old PC bus to eventually PCI bus change over days.

Now if they can come up with a radical Memory update it will be all set

El

 

[CRGreathouse]

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.

Yeah, but how much more capacity does a TB HD have than a 5x200 GB RAID?

 

[TeeSeeJay]

Yeah, but how much more capacity does a TB HD have than a 5x200 GB RAID?

Same capacity, but the RAID is vastly superior due to increased access times and throughput.

Actually, Since you can't have 5 IDE drives, you'd need to go SCSI. Largest SCSI drives are 145.6GB. You'd need 7 of these, which would net you 1.019 TB.

 

[TeeSeeJay]

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!

First off all, you will never be recording uncompressed HDTV to a PVR. Not even today's SDTV PVRs record uncompressed video.

Secondly, chances are strongly against your ability to record HDTV AT ALL. For much the same reason as HD audio devices lack a digital output, new generations of HDTV devices will use the DVI interconnect, capable of encrypting the signal and preventing the recording thereof. (either DVI or encrypted IEEE1394).

That means that when ABC broadcasts Hit Movie in 720p, they can flag it as "unrecordable." Same with HBO when they show LOTR:FOTR:EE:HD. Same as the HD-DVD of that same movie.

So, the Terabyte drive as the answer to your HDTV prayers? Not likely.

The only thing known to man today that records HDTV, D-VHS, does it with MPEG2 (just like a DVD), and fits 4 hours on a single cassette at it's highest quality. Why do you need a TB hard disk? Oh yeah, because tape sucks -- and I agree with you there.

Edit: In case you want to argue that with big enough hard drives, we won't need to compress the video, keep in mind that Concern Number One will be fitting an HD movie onto the same size disc we're all used to. Red laser, blue laser, whatever -- one thing's for certain, we ain't going back to 12" laserdiscs. The likely #1 source of your HDTV viewing, HD-DVD, will be compressed when you buy it. Over the air? compressed when they send it. A "Channel" is only a 6mhz band. They already squeeze two-to-four "channels" into one of these bands if you have digital cable, and the only way they can get HDTV to you is to compress it. Same with satellite.

So why would you be interested in recording uncompressed HDTV, even if you could? You've already lost anything you're going to lose, because it's been heavily compressed before it ever got to you.

 

[LightPhoenix]

This is complete theory, and not even taking quantum mechanics into account, but...

The smallest binary recorder I can think of right now would be an electron, which can be either spin up or spin down. Electrons are significantly smaller than atoms.

 

[jdavis]

Same capacity, but the RAID is vastly superior due to increased access times and throughput.

Actually, Since you can't have 5 IDE drives, you'd need to go SCSI. Largest SCSI drives are 145.6GB. You'd need 7 of these, which would net you 1.019 TB.

Raid is more complicated and SCSI is more complicated and both are more expensive, it will equal out. Faster is more expensive, one drive will be cheaper and easier to work with for the average computer user, RAID is the way to go for business and advanced users but it is expensive, complicated and takes up a lot more space.

 

[TeeSeeJay]

Raid is more complicated and SCSI is more complicated and both are more expensive, it will equal out. Faster is more expensive, one drive will be cheaper and easier to work with for the average computer user, RAID is the way to go for business and advanced users but it is expensive, complicated and takes up a lot more space.

This is all true. However, if you spend enough money, SCSI and RAID become simpler than IDE. No jumpers, no ribbon cables. Creating a RAID3/5 stripe set is just running a wizard.

Back to the question of the 1 Terabyte drive. I'd bet a dollar that if it were released today, it wouldn't work in any of our computers. Why? Too many shortcuts got us where we are today. Technically, there shouldn't be a problem. We can do huge partitions -- and even if we couldn't, there's always multiple partitions. But any number of potential roadblocks exist:

1. BIOS incompatibility. Anyone remember the 540MB limit? You needed a BIOS upgrade or a disk management overlay to get around the hardware limitation.

2. Remember the 640k limit? It gave us Low, high, expanded, and extended memory. Windows works around that for us, now.

3. Cluster size. Remember FAT? Remember taking a 1.6GB drive and partitioning into four 400MB logical disks? All because the too-big FAT cluster size meant that a lot of your space got eaten up by small files. Big drives=big clusters.

4. Could be anything, really. I'm not an expert in storage esoterica.

Can we expect 1TB disk drives? Absolutely. Patches and BIOS upgrades, if necessary, are easily deliverable. Can we use all that space? Oh, I'm sure we'll find a way.

But most of the "rich media" scenarios put forth by the original poster are unrelated to storage capacity -- they're matters of bandwidth, politics, and copyright law. The first 1TB disk drive will not be the watershed moment he envisions.