Researchers from Toshiba and Tohoku University in Japan have announced a new method of creating magnetic read heads that could boost hard drive storage density from the current record for a shipping product of 178.8Gb per square inch to beyond the 1Tb mark. The proposed next-generation technology would utilize Nanocontact Magnetic Resistance to boost the magnetoresistance of the drive head. Drive prototypes have demonstrated a magnetoresistance ratio that's twice as large as current read heads (140% at room temperature), as well as decreased resistances that should allow for further miniaturization of drive read heads. Toshiba doesn't expect to debut new drives based on the NC-MR design for another five years.
News source: Ars Technica
News source: Ars Technica
a larger hard drive is just means you can loose that much more stuff in a single drive failure
Yeah, I too have never had a disk failure that's resulted in the loss of unrecoverable data. But really, if you have a 1TB drive, how much of that data is actually really valuable to you?
Really, all you need to backup are your documents, your work and I suppose your game saves. 99% of people wont require more than 25Gb of space for all that, with only really the video editing people requiring so much.
This doesn't make sense to me. Pretty soon now, when a 1 TB drive will be as cheap as yesterday's 250 GB drive, why would one opt for 250 GB? It'll be just as easy to RAID two 1 TB drives. 250 GB's will probably even stop being produced, like 25 GB drives aren't made today. It's just the regular progress of technology, and people will probably always find something to fill the drives with too -- they always did in the past at least.
I wouldn't call raid a "backup solution." More like, a downtime prevention mechanism. If you are relying on raid for your backup schemes, then your data must not be worth that much to you.
Yeah, I too have never had a disk failure that's resulted in the loss of unrecoverable data. But really, if you have a 1TB drive, how much of that data is actually really valuable to you?
Really, all you need to backup are your documents, your work and I suppose your game saves. 99% of people wont require more than 25Gb of space for all that, with only really the video editing people requiring so much.
I disagree, cause i got 850GB total hdd space (3 hdd's, 250GB - 200GB - 400GB) and even though it aint full, it's getting somewhat close and ill admit there is a moderate amount i could delete if i had to but i would say at least half of what i got on there now (or more) i would want to keep there... mainly speaking about XviD movies primarily.... and im sure theres LOTS of people like me in this sence so that "99percent" comment i dont think is true.
Like a similar hard drive?
CD/DVDs/even HD/BluRay discs have never kept up with hard drive capacity, so what I've been doing for a long time now is leave my old hard drives in my older systems, and use them to backup the important stuff on my primary PC. A weekly batch file invoking xcopy with the proper flags works fine, robocopy (from the Windows 2000 resource kit) is even better to avoid copying identical files. Takes me half an hour to sync the important files on my primary PC with the backup, across a 100mbps LAN...typically much less, if only a few files have changed.
I don't like tapes because they're slow and inconvenient. Didn't mean to delete a file? A simple drag and drop across a share on my LAN will take care of that.
For bigger disaster recovery, I use Acronis once a month to backup my OS partition--I also put that file (<30GB) on my backup machine. I keep the OS and data files as part of different backup sets.
Then once every two months I'll back that up to tape, but I've yet to have a reason to use it.
Intel's latest mobos are getting rid of the IDE channels, so let's make mini-boards of 2,4,8,16,32,etc GB RAM sticks designed to run an OS and store files.
I have 2x160GB HDDs. I use the first one to only store my OS and Program Files which comes to 1.45 GB in total. Having this defragmented with UltimateDefrag places all of that at the beginning of the disk (outer track - only about 1/3 of it). Even when files fragment, it's still on the outer track so performance isn't affected anywhere remotely close to where a human being would notice it.
I would like to have 4 HDDs: OS, Program Files, Games, Storage.
But I would like even more to have 4x160GB RAM sticks (or some futuristic form of solid state storage that's extremely fast and does not fragment!
Cheers.
But I would like even more to have 4x160GB RAM sticks (or some futuristic form of solid state storage that's extremely fast and does not fragment!
Cheers.
If you can't wait, Dell has 32GB solid state ATA drives for sale. For the low price of $500 each.
http://accessories.us.dell.com/sna/product...p;c=us&l=en
There are 64GB models due out any day now. But I guess it's going to be another year at the minimum until any of them become affordable.
Still, it's going to be interesting to finally see the end of mechanical HDs. It's like the end of vinyl records or something.
-Spenser
wow!
anyway, for me, space is not that important...i concern more about data security...it will be nice if they can also develop new hard drives that can resist shocks...this is a big disadvantage of hard drive...otherwise i will have to go with flash memory in the future...
That's been answered a long time ago. 640KB.
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