Speaking of which.. what is a good hard drive that is above 1tb that is extra loud? I want my kids to grow up with a loud hard drive just like I did....
Try a Seagate Constellation. I bought one a year ago and the damn thing was so loud that I had to hack the box by installing elastic cord to keep the HDD floating and fixed.
I remember listening to the sounds of the audio tape drive loading games in my 8bit 64kbyte RAM home computer. I don't wish my kids will ever have to go through that :)
The WD 1 TB Black drive I bought in 2009 (and still works great) is rather quiet to my ears and I'm a complete PC silence freak to the point I bought a liquid cooled 1080 Ti to avoid the cooling fans from running on the video card itself.
Running WD Reds in my Synology (DS415play/4TB drives), and I can tell when the nightly backup starts because I hear the drives pick up. Granted I'm only a couple of feet away, and only notice when the room is otherwise silent, but definitely audible.
My Synology is rather loud I'll admit, but at least it's two bigger 120mm fans so the sound isn't too high-pitched. Have you tried turning the profile to quiet on DSM?
>> What provisions are there on restoring these Helium HDDs to working order 10+ years from now on?
None. The He will leak and eventually positioning errors will become frequent if the drive stays in service long enough. It is not economically feasible to prevent the He diffusion. The drives are designed to lose He slowly enough to exceed their useful service life.
The process was developed by HGST (now owned by WD) and it's called HelioSeal. The drive chassis is tin plated steel that is laser welded inside an He filled chamber creating a hermetically sealed enclosure. The pressure inside the enclosure is slightly lower than atmospheric, but He is still lost very slowly through diffusion. Given this process it's difficult to imagine a feasible repair technique; one would have to cut open the chassis and later reseal it in an He atmosphere.
Something to consider; there is no means of restoring a flash cell to service after it's been worn out, yet that hasn't prevented widespread and highly successful Flash adoption. I doubt the unserviceable nature of Helium filled drives will impede adoption.
It might not be that bad, actually (unless you open it up).
Even cheap butyl gaskets will do a good job keeping out the constituents of a standard air mixture of gases. Any He leakage would thus cause a pressure differential, which will tend to prevent further outleakage of He (by countering the entropy gain from mixing He with the air outside).
> Even cheap butyl gaskets will do a good job keeping out the constituents of a standard air mixture of gases. Any He leakage would thus cause a pressure differential, which will tend to prevent further outleakage of He (by countering the entropy gain from mixing He with the air outside).
While this would probably be true for almost any other gas, Helium is devilishly small and can permeate through the metal over time. [0]
I had a scare once and lost a few months worth of pictures. Glad it was only regular life instead of anything important, but that was what pushed me to always value backups and redundancy.
These drives tend to be thicker than the standard 2.5" slot (7 or 9 mm). Which is why they are only sold as external drives. You can't fit one in a laptop or third-party 2.5" enclosure.
The one you linked to is 20.5 mm thick and weighs 540 g including the enclosure. I'm not even sure whether there's a single 4 TB drive in there, since a pair of 2 TB, 7 mm Seagate drives would be both thinner and lighter.
Looking at the page I remembered the first HDD I even bought: a 13GB from IBM (before the deathstar chapter). Coming from a 1GB drive, I thought this thing would never be filled. Didn't took long before I revise my billgatey judgement.
I remember buying a 1GB SCSI drive for $950 pretty much because it was the size of all the disk storage in the machine room at USC when I was attending (three strings of drives 330MB each string, whohoo!). I was just amazed at one drive that I could buy with as much storage as that entire room. I have it sitting next to an original ST506 drive from Shugart (5MB in 5.25" full height form factor).
Interestingly, still 1 in 10^15 unrecoverable bit error rate[1]. What that means from a practical standpoint is that you are essentially guaranteed an unrecoverable bit read error if you read the drive end to end (as you would if you were re-silvering a RAID 1 mirror), and in a RAID6 configuration I'm guessing it will take about a week to reconstruct a failed drive at low priority. All that storage behind a single port which has a sequential transfer rate of 255 MBs[1].
What that means from a practical standpoint is that you are essentially guaranteed an unrecoverable bit read error if you read the drive end to end
That sounds scary, but if I remember a research paper from a few years ago (reading smaller drives multiple times over), these are very conservative estimates.
Also, I think you're an order of magnitude off --- 10^15 bits is close to 100TB, not 10TB.
You guys are making me feel old. My father bought my first 20 MiB hard drive used for close to $1000. It was the size of a VCR and sounded like a jet engine.
Interestingly I think the typical usage on a single drive for the average user has topped out at about 1-2 TB over the past few years. Unless you are a supreme data hoarder this is more than enough to handle the typical user’s OS, all of it’s software and a decent collection of media (TV, music, movies) in respectable quality. This idea goes a bit out the window if you are talking about ultra high quality media of course, but for me (and I think most average users) 1080p for movies/TV and v0/320kbps level quality for music is more than sufficient.
We will eventually reach the limit on what the human body can perceive in terms of audio and video quality (if we haven’t already yet, I know it’s quite debatable whether there is a perceptible difference between v0 and FLAC for instance) and that coupled with the amount of media a human can reasonably consume in a lifetime might sort of put a cap on the amount of storage needed by the typical consumer. This is of course assuming no new technology like IPFS comes along that might incentivize storing other people’s data or some other similar radical technological innovation.
My impression (from helping family set up off-to-college computers over the past couple of years) is that modern teenagers typically have over a TB of photos shot on their iphones. And that doesn't include video. They're on track to need 5 TB of storage just for still photos by the end of their lifetime.
> We will eventually reach the limit on what the human body can perceive in terms of audio and video quality
Maybe on a flat screen across the living room. But when you have, say, 20k (~800 megapixels), you can expand the field of view to cover the entire sphere. Add in computational photography that allows refocusing and a (limited) amount of movement, and there is the potential for amateur-shot video to soak up any amount of storage you can buy.
Video resolutions have not yet peaked though; most people don't have 4k media, but 4k TVs are becoming more and more popular. This is counterbalanced by the fact that people have netflix &c. rather than downloading movies. As internet gets faster, and people get more devices, it makes less and less sense to store things locally (you don't have 2TB of storage on your phone, so if you're going to stream there, why not also stream to your pc?)
4k isn't likely to be the peak, I'm guessing 360' video, and 2x4k stereoscopic video will become normal too. And moving lightfield video, that can be refocused at playback.
1080p movies can vary quite a bit in size. How many audio channels? How many languages? Lossy or lossless audio? What kind of compression has been done to the video itself? How many keyframes?
And what is a decent collection of media? With high standards for multimedia you may only get a few dozen TV shows or maybe 50 or so movies per 2TB drive.
As for music, in today's age there isn't much reason to settle for less than FLAC, you will still be very hard-pressed to fill up 2TB with just music. I've recently taken to ripping music videos and adding them to my artist folders and I'm still having a hard time filling up my damn music drive.
Of course, people have different reasons for storing media. For some it's just about quantity and not quality, but some of us are preparing for the digital dark ages and want to make sure our media is of the highest quality so that it might be useful to others one day. It's all about that 48/96khz 24-bit, baby.
We're already at the limit - we take many more pictures than we care to see again later, we have many more books than we could read, our phones already have a resolution higher than the eye and the cameras are so fine we can hardly see the difference when the image is not zoomed out. What counts now is not quantity, but selection of content, to help us find what we care about in the mountain of things we will never get to see. We've come to the point where Google recommends our own photos to us, for rewatching.
But the enemy of large HDDs is the broadband connection, not our limited ability to consume. If it weren't for the broadband connection, we'd have to host the content locally.
Humans accumulate an ever growing collection of personal photos and videos as they get older. Eventually it will become like gmail, where you never delete them.
Varies from person to person. After my cat died last year I started remembering each and every photo I had taken in different places over the years and somehow I lost track of a single photo (I'm not sure how it never got put in a single cloud photo service but I suspect it's because I took it on a camera, not a smartphone) that stood out to me because I remember it as probably the happiest he ever looked. I felt pretty terrible given of all the digital hoarding I do I couldn't keep track of one stinking picture that would mean more to me than hundreds of 4K movies. I'm a bit more liberal with my picture taking now knowing what I went through after the death of a cat and with people it would be worse.
I once thought experience was enough for me, however I've learned that memory fades. I can only recall bits and pieces of things I thought I'd never forget.
There's nothing that jostles my memory quite as well as a picture.
The Google robotic overlord does a very good job at showing you interesting photos from years ago. I started taking pictures and forgetting about them only to be pleasantly surprised a few years from now.
I remember the first hard drive my dad bought. It was 5MB and designed to work with the Atari 800 home computer. It connected to the Atari through ?two? of the computer's joystick ports. As a kid that was pretty annoying, but in hindsight, it was a very clever hack.
My first HDD was a mere 40MB back in the nineties on a PC that run at 10 MHz. It was a beast and very noisy. Before shutting down the computer you had to run a program that parked the heads otherwise you'd run the risk of destroying it. Oh those were the days.
No I used Turbo Pascal. The IDE was something like two to three floppies if I remember correctly. I still have all that in the basement in my parent's house.
my first hard drive was 500mb and was about $500. also bought an external 2x CD rom drive, which had a caddy and came with Myst, for $700. this was around the early-mid 90's.
Unless your sound card had the ide interface or you managed to have the right audio cable to connect the drive to it and let the drive do the playing with not controls for yourself.
Hah! 10mb in an IBM clone in the 80's. Later a 70mb Unix box was able to run an entire business (10 Wyse Terminals) with that. 4mb of memory iirc.
The 70mb Unix drives were iirc about $4000 in 80's dollars. Or maybe that was the 4mb of memory. I actually have the sales brochure and have to dig that up.
Oh, I believe you. I say that because I was skimming to see if anyone could "beat" me. You tied. :-) And the only reason I was skimming was to comment to parent, who said they thought they'd never fill a 13Gb drive: yeah, that's what I thought when I bought a 10Mb drive 30 years ago.
Now, I don't think you can even buy media that small. Hell, the internet is infested with single web pages that wouldn't fit on that drive.
Hard drives back then actually had capacities in binary megabytes, and often even slightly more. The "10MB" HDD in the first PCs held 10653696 bytes, and the "5MB" one 5326848 bytes.
our first 286 at home eventually got upgraded with a 10 mb HDD. you could store 3 entire floppies on that, and those games would load so fast. And then you had monsters like DoTT or Monkey Island coming on 12 floopies or so. Haha. 30G or so for War of the Chosen still boggles my mind sometimes.
Yeah, I think the first GOOD computer we had that I really monkeyed with (ignoring the XT we pawned off on my sister when she went to college) was a 486 with a 250mb hard disk, so I remember purchasing a 560MB seagate to expand capacity and boot Linux from.
First moderately modern drive was a Rodime 3.5" 10MB. Smuggled out of the factory somehow (which was just down the road from where I worked). That was the first drive that looked like they still do today.
You completely missed the drawn of HDDs with the ST506 5MB, and the big breakthrough when the much faster 10MB ST512 replaced it? Those were the exciting days.
My first computer (Nascom 2) didn't even have a floppy. A hard disk would have cost many more
times than the computer. The first hard disk I saw
many years later was 80 MB and very loud.
Almost six orders of magnitude advancement. I do
wonder if humanity will every be able to pull such a stunt again.
My father bought a Nascom 1 as his first computer, which was a DIY kit if I remember correctly. We still have it around. :)
My first contact with a computer was the BBC Micro B. Such a wonderful machine and I still power it up a few times per year! Chuckie Egg and Castle Quest ftw! ;)
Yep, my Nascom 2 was a kit (2000+ solder points!). I maintain nascomhomepage.com which has most everything. If you have anything not already there, kindly share!
First desktop I was offered was around Win95 release. 500MB was the norm I believe, assembler and parents were generous I suppose so I got a full GB. I have a lot of hdd from that era (some seagate 4GB that still work btw) but this one I don't know.
Before that we briefly had an Amstrad CPC512 with two floppies and nothing else :D
First hard drive was 20MB. Cheap PC clone 8088 that when purchased came with only a floppy drive. About 1988 I guess? The hard drive was a later upgrade. I too had no idea how I would ever fill that much storage.
I had a Mac IIC with a 40mb internal hard drive in the late 80s. It was much better than swapping floppy disks or even worse using the audio tape drive on my vic20 I had before that.
Glad to see these making their way into retail channels. I've been a little frustrated reading articles in the consumer press about HDDs which are only ever shipped B2B.
Physical? You could jam a lot more storage in a 3.5" drive than you're ever going to see, but it would not be economically practical, and the MTBF and reliability would be very poor.
Compared to our Data Growth, HDD capacity growth has been rather slow in recent years. ( In terms of TB/Plate ) I thought DC were suppose to drive the HAMR ( Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording )tech forward when the consumer space is now in decline.
Or has the tech matured to the point, where even small and medium size company are happy with these 12TB HDD, and larger HDD only mattered to a few such as Google, Netflix, Amazon, Blackblaze, OVH, Microsoft and Apple etc.
Speaking of which.. what is a good hard drive that is above 1tb that is extra loud? I want my kids to grow up with a loud hard drive just like I did....