[aldo_14]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/11/18/seagate_400gb/
Hard drive maker Seagate has begun shipping what it claims is the world's highest capacity PC hard drive: a 400GB beast that's also the first drive of its class to hold up to 133GB on a single platter.

At its announcement last June, the Barracuda 7200.8 was also said to offer "the industry's first native Serial ATA interface with native command queuing". Clearly, some crafty rival has got there ahead of Seagate. Now the 7200.8 is actually shipping, the company simply refers instead to its "most advanced single-chip native Serial ATA (SATA) interface with native command queuing".
Click Here

NCQ allows drive read and write commands to be re-ordered to minimise the movement of the drive heads. The upshot is faster access and reduced wear and tear, boosting the drive's longevity.

Indeed, Seagate claimed the 7200rpm 7200.8 is able to match the performance of a 10,000rpm Serial ATA, thanks to NCQ and the use of asynchronous I/O.

The 3.5in 7200.8 ships with either 8MB or 16MB of cache, and comes in 200, 250 and 300GB flavours in addition to the 400GB model. Each offers an average seek time of 8ms. Seagate is also offering Ultra ATA versions as well as the native Serial ATA units

[Setekh]

My 30gb suddenly feels inadequate. Oh, for the days when 1.44mb was enough to store my OS and all the "media" I ever needed...

[kode]

Originally posted by Setekh
My 30gb suddenly feels inadequate. Oh, for the days when 1.44mb was enough to store my OS and all the "media" I ever needed...

that'd be the '70s then? heck, dos 3 was on 3 floppy discs, win 3.1 on 5 or so.

[Stealth]

naaa it wasn't even that long ago, i remember in the mid 90s, with windows 95 i had a 3 GB hard drive, and it sufficed.

[aldo_14]

I remember my first Pc (486DX/2 66MhZ - whoaff!) had something like a 45MB hard drive.

[kode]

Originally posted by Stealth
naaa it wasn't even that long ago, i remember in the mid 90s, with windows 95 i had a 3 GB hard drive, and it sufficed.

well, a 3gb drive is ~2000 times more spacy than a floppy disc. early 90's hdd's generally had around 100-300mb, I think I even had a 500mb one.

my laptop 386 has an 80mb drive, iirc. I can't get it working anymore - the drive in question died, I think.

[Fineus]

Think of the defrag times on one of those babies... sheesh...

[Liberator]

This to me just screams "ARCHIVE!".  

Maybe it's my mistrust of something so compact, but methinks you should have a 40gb for day to day ops and use this for longterm media and data storage.  The access times are going to be gigantic, I don't care what nifty shortcuts they've cooked up.

[karajorma]

Originally posted by kode


that'd be the '70s then? heck, dos 3 was on 3 floppy discs, win 3.1 on 5 or so.

Yeah but windows has always been a hog. Get a better operting system and you could have kept using a disk until the late 80s at least.

[Carl]

no, in the seventies you had a 256 byte HD. it could store a short document, that's about it.

[kode]

Originally posted by Carl
no, in the seventies you had a 256 byte HD. it could store a short document, that's about it.

liar.

I'm not sure there were any hard drives for home use back then, but the ones that existed could definitely store more than 256 bytes. the first ibm-pc with a hard drive had a 10mb one.

[SKYNET-011]

Why would you need that much?

[ZylonBane]

I look at drives like that and just think: All eggs -> One basket.

There was an interesting editorial I read a few years back about how hard drive capacity is growing at such a rate that we almost never need to delete anything anymore. Gone are the days of having to remove files to make room for something else... now when we run out of space, we just buy a bigger hard drive and move everything over. I'm pretty sure I have stuff on my hard drive that I haven't looked at in years, but I still keep it on the drive, just in case.

Oh, and Carl, the first hard drive was introduced in 1956 by IBM, and had a ~4.4MB storage capacity.
http://www.cedmagic.com/history/ibm-305-ramac.html

[kasperl]

But before there were HD's as such, people did indead use machines with a couple of bytes of memory, and a kilobyte being a lot.

[Mad Bomber]

Heh. I've been working with 400GB SATA HD's this size for a couple months now, at work.

(Or rather, my co-workers have. I'm not actually on that project. But eh, close enough.)

[SKYNET-011]

I'd rather have multiple hard drives. That way, if 1 dies, it's not a total loss.

[Sandwich]

Originally posted by ZylonBane
I look at drives like that and just think: All eggs -> One basket.

There was an interesting editorial I read a few years back about how hard drive capacity is growing at such a rate that we almost never need to delete anything anymore. Gone are the days of having to remove files to make room for something else... now when we run out of space, we just buy a bigger hard drive and move everything over. I'm pretty sure I have stuff on my hard drive that I haven't looked at in years, but I still keep it on the drive, just in case.

Oh, and Carl, the first hard drive was introduced in 1956 by IBM, and had a ~4.4MB storage capacity.
http://www.cedmagic.com/history/ibm-305-ramac.html

Who are you, and why are you posting exactly what I think?

[Grey Wolf]

I'm fairly sure Hitachi beat them to it, as that one has been in the stores for at least a week.

[Ford Prefect]

You could have complete archives of all the porn ever created by humanity.

[Liberator]