Forums | MacLife

By MAY WONG
SAN JOSE, Calif. (AP) - Multimedia stockpilers need not worry about laptops, digital video recorders or portable music players hitting a storage capacity ceiling any time soon.
Hitachi Ltd. (HIT) (HIT) says its researchers have successfully shrunken a key component in hard drives to a nanoscale that will pave the way for quadrupling today's storage limits to 4 terabytes for desktop computers and 1 terabyte on laptops in 2011.
A terabyte can hold the text of roughly 1 million books, 250 hours of high-definition video, or a quarter million songs.
"It means the industry is making good progress to advance the capacity of disk drives and move to smaller form factors," said John Rydning, an analyst at market research firm IDC.

The feat, which Hitachi plans to present Monday at the Perpendicular Magnetic Recording Conference in Tokyo, revisits a technology known as giant magnetoresistance, or GMR, that was the basis of the work of two European scientists who won the Nobel Prize in physics last week.
A hard drive has a metal disk inside that spins as an arm with an electromagnetic head at its tip hovers over it. The head reads bits of data by registering the magnetic bearing of the particles on the disk.
Capacities of hard drives have grown as researchers have crammed more bits of data closer together while also making the heads sensitive enough to read the data. The industry looks to new technologies every time physical limitations kick in, and GMR - which allows for extremely thin layers of alternating metals to detect weak changes in magnetism - was one of the breakthroughs that led to the fastest growth rate in the early 2000s, allowing hard drives to double in capacity every year.
But GMR-based heads maxed out, and the industry replaced the technology in recent years with an entirely different kind of head. Yet researchers are predicting that technology will soon run into capacity problems, and now GMR is making a comeback as the next-generation successor.
"We changed the direction of the current and adjusted the materials to get good properties," said John Best, chief technologist for Hitachi's data-storage unit.
By doing so, Hitachi said it has created the world's smallest disk drive heads in the 30-nanometer to 50-nanometer range, or about 2,000 times smaller than the width of an average human hair.
Other hard drive companies are working on similar technology as well, Rydning said. He predicted the entire disk drive industry will begin migrating to this new type of GMR-based technology in 2009.

IMHO this is a non-story.  Was anyone NOT expecting hard drives to be 3 to 4 times bigger in 5 years?

Sure, 4TB sounds impressive, but not by 2011. Hard drives -should- be hitting 4TB in 5 years.

What, may I ask, are you going to put on a 4TB drive?  A bunch of hi-def video I suppose...

pkmgarf wrote:

What, may I ask, are you going to put on a 4TB drive?  A bunch of hi-def video I suppose...

You know, people were asking that very question when five megabyte drives came to market, some twenty-five years back.

It was a stupid question then and, well… you fill in the rest.

,xtG
.tsooJ

pkmgarf wrote:

What, may I ask, are you going to put on a 4TB drive?  A bunch of hi-def video I suppose...

OS Drive (programs and such): ~90GB
Main Data Drive:
-itunes library: 100 GB
-Photographs: 17 GB
-Misc imove docs: 11 GB
-Misc Documents: 99 GB
-Back up of all of the household appleTV rips: 43 GB

BU Drive:
Exact copy of every thing on data drive minus apple tv rips: ~230 GB

disk copies drive: 230 GB of misc install disks and exact copies of dvd
Cakejd Project Drive: 100 Gb of original SD video clips & MPEG2 encodes for 1 DVD

OS Bu drive 1: 100 GB of house hold OSX os back ups
OS Bu drive 2: ~90 GB an exact copy of my main os drive.

-----------------------
I am looking at 1.1 T of what I have.
This does not include:
50+ Back up CDs and 10+ back up DVDs that has data from pre 2001
Apple Logic Studio which will be installed within a month or so
a few apple jam packs
what ever Leopard will take up
+ my new Cannon Rebel xti @ 10 mega pixels (2.8 - 3 plus megs each) loves to chew up space.

Oh and my Mother has taken up drawing historical building and scanning and reproducing @ 13 by 19, scanned with no compression weigh in at 400 megs each)

ukimalefu wrote:

No, the answer is pr0n!

It always is... it always is.

pkmgarf wrote:

Maybe I should clarify...for the average user, 4TB is overkill.  Even now, my 500gb drive is more than I will need.  I consider myself to have a rather large music library at ~40gb, but that is not even 10% of my drive. 

Most people don't do drive backups, though they should, but they don't.  Granted, some people will fill 4TB, but unless file sizes increase or people start scanning eight foot by eight foot photos, it is overkill, in my opinion.  However, I do realize that more and more people will be storing video digitally and doing DVR type stuff....so, when that takes off to the point that it is as mainstream as DVD's, drive requirements for the average user will change.  My statement was meant to apply to how people use their stuff now....

In 1997 I got a 6500 with a 2.1 gig hard drive, a 100% increase over the 1 gig drive my 6400 had. I wondered what on earth I would do with all that space.
10 years latter I have almost 500gigs of space and am running out of room.

pkmgarf wrote:

Most people don't do drive backups, though they should, but they don't.

Got something to back that up?

mrreet2001 wrote:

pkmgarf wrote:

Maybe I should clarify...for the average user, 4TB is overkill.

no to the "average" user 40 gigs is over kill.

if a user has all of there music ripped then 200 gigs is over kill

however if a person does any real work such as photos, video, audio

4T would / will / is very handy

And this claim is grounded in what?

More then enough people have several gigs of music and or photos. Moreover, now that people are making and buying movies online, disk space vanishes quickly.

And with the upcoming popularity of integrated version tracking and backup software, 40gigs is going to be crippling.

I've come to learn that "average user" is really just code for "my parents."

I've got a 500 GB HD and an Airport Extreme with Airdisk in the mail.

I intend to have a computer in every room of my new apartment. There will be multimedia glory on the smurfing toilet, people.

I don't have a hard drive. My OS, apps, and files exist on a series of 3.5 in. double density  floppies.