- Sunday, 22 November 2009
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We twa hae run about the braes, And pu'd the gowans fine. - Robert Burns
Biggest hard drive in the world arrives
WESTERN DIGITAL seems to be sticking to its guns with traditional spinning platter hard drives whilst all around them are falling to the guile of those new fangled Solid State Drives and their wicked no-moving-parts voodoo.
The latest record breaker from California-based WD is what it reckons to be the industry's first ever 2TB hard drive.
The 2TB WD Caviar Green sits in a 3.5-inch casing and contains four platters each holding up to 500GB of data.
The drives feature a number of proprietory technologies, including Stabletrac which cuts down spindle vibration, Intellipower which controls the spin speed to save energy where possible, and Intelliseek which cuts down power consumption, noise and vibration.
There's also something called Notouch which makes sure the recording head never actually comes into contact with the platter which means less wear and tear, and less chance that the reader arm will gouge a chunk out of the disk's data surface if you drop the thing whilst lugging it about.
The drives, which also come in a 1.5TB flavour, should be available from the usual channels right now with the bigger brother weighing in at $299. µ
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I wasn't aware that the head ever did touch the platter in the first place, but that it "flew" above the medium? Some clarification would be nice.
when in operation, the head never touches the platter. When shut off, many drives will simply let the heads fall down onto the surface of the platter. This is how it's been done since ancient times. However, when laptops were invented, the needs to prevent parking on the surface of the drive became important because laptops start and stop their drives so often to save power. drive heads were unable to withstand this level of wear and tear so drive manufacturers started parking heads on a little plastic holder thingie on the side of the platters. You can see this structure (which is orange)in the picture supplied. Some other manufacturers already use this technique in their line of desktop drives as well.
This drive is not revolutionary, it simply ups the platter density, but is otherwise the same as the other "green power" line of 5400rpm drives. Not to say that the worlds first 2TB drive is not a welcome addition.
The drives spin speed does not alter BTW, its 5400 rpm constantly, doesnt go up, doesnt go down.
And as an explanation to "Jason" and everyone else, all HDD's for several years have been using off platter head parking as standard. And a read/write head that touches a platter is known as a head crash, and literally strips the data off of your HDD - not good.
Andy
I wonder when hard drive vendors are going to finally get with it and label the *actual* storage capacity?
The label on the box defines 1MB=1,000,000 bytes. However to every OS out there ever created, 1MB=1,024,768 bytes.
So when you buy this 2TB wonder, Windows will be proud to let you know you just purchased a 1862.6GB drive, once formatted. So the difference between marketing and reality is a loss of 137.4 GIGABYTES of space.
No wonder these companies keep getting sued over and over again...
Confusion over, at least on paper and since 1999.
they will get there act together one day, but there really is a difference between 1000 and 1024, and you cab find out about it in the following links.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigabyte
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibibyte
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Andy
If indeed "to every OS out there ever created, 1MB=1,024,768 bytes" then every OS out there has it wrong. That there are many of them does not make them right, you know. Kilo-, mega-, giga-, tera-, etc. are all standard prefixes that have been in circulation for quite a while before computers and their binary units came along. They all are powers of 10, not 2. Read the articles linked by Andy for details. BTW, here's a quick example to highlight the importance of clarity about such issues: ever wonder how the 3.5" DS/HD floppy's capacity is quoted as "1.44MB"? I mean, it should be either 1.47MB or 1.41MiB, right? Well, here's how: their "MB" is actually 1024x1000 bytes! A hybrid "MB"! Here's the math: 2x80x18x512=1474560Bytes. 1474560/1024/1000=1.44 so-called megabytes!!! See?
1/10th Price of Hard Drive two mere years ago. INCREDIBLE. Shirley (with Dimples) States: I Know Your NOT Selling 10X More. Who thought UP This LOW Price thing? Anyway: Picture "C" Drive 2 TB, Ultimate. See Gotcha. Total Exhaustion. 2 N' RAID?.Maybe 4, At Those Prices.Over Hundred Mb/s of 2 tb is large sec search times.maybe minutee' Filling it? Maybe LifeTimes.Complete Clone Transfer: 2 hours+. as "C" Drive. Wow, Going Suprascomic.It Is Storage Gultch. Anyway, thats 200 dl dvd,Each Unit, ALL in BIG Gush, Per Spin. Drashek Quiet Hum Master.
1024 is correct.
It is used because of the intrinsic binary quantum nature of computers.
It's very useful to count combinations/permutations of a data string of x bits. Memory is byte-addressable, operations are performed on word boundaries, etc.
1024 is correct. We're counting.
1000 is used for classical measurements.
This is why clock speed and baud rates are measured using 1000. Storage such are counted using 1024.
The mixing of the 2 (most well known back in the floppy days) was a marketing decision. People knew what a KB was - 1024 bytes. But you could fool a lot of people with MB, since the term was less common. It was also thought at the time that KB would be the standard unit of measure. Early floppy drives were often marketed as 1440 KB, not 1.44 MB.
And today, the tiny print that tells you 1 TB = 1,000,000,000,000 bytes is due to marketing.
There is no reason to use "standard" SI units just because they're "standard". The field should use what makes sense for the science. We should not dumb it down for the masses, nor should we have ever stood for it when the marketers did what marketers do best - lie.
So what you're saying, Brian, is that standards are not necessary and that every group of people should use whatever terms they want to describe things. Or, worse yet, redefine the same terms others use to mean whatever they think they should mean. I'm not sure if you realize the gravity of what you're suggesting, really. But it would be a major regression. Standards are defined for a reason, you know.
To complain that a formatted drive shows less space than the space shown on the box misses a fundamental point: the amount of space will vary with how you format the drive. It only makes sense to talk about the size of the unformatted drive. Don't throw your toys out of the pram about 1862.6GB on a 2TB drive. Most of the supposed loss is because you formatted it. Try using it without it being formatted!
What a lot of people seem to be missing is that the cost of this is over twice that of 2 x 1TB drives. Why??? It actually costs less to manufacture a single drive yet it costs more than 2?
This entire charging a premium based on size alone on a single drive is a con!
I don't know about you guys but 137GB is a lot of storage. And I can't believe that some of you are OK with companies interchanging units of measure that never should have been. Anything with the word byte implies base 2 so how the hell does that become the same as base 10...?
I dont intend demand credit, but i believe i invented the term head perking around 1992 in Pakistan. My brother had written a DOS .bat file which used to just say something like "ok to shutdown". I asked him one day "does it park the heads in some safe place" he said "wa!?! ... Mmm yes it does".
Around that time maybe before, on DOS 5.0 there was a third party utility called "park.com" which parked HDD heads and then displayed something along the lines "Now it is safe to turn off"