PC Drive Reaches 500GB

KingFishKingFish
edited April 2005 in Science & Tech
Drive capacity soars to a new high as makers begin to turn to a new recording technology.
Hitachi's new Deskstar 7K500 drive marks several milestones in the storage industry: It's the first desktop hard drive to reach 500GB and one of the first to use the speedy new SATA II interface. In terms of how it stores data, though, the Deskstar may be among the last of its kind, as drive manufacturers begin to approach the limits of how densely they can pack data using today's standard recording technology.

Demand for greater capacity continues to rise due in large part to a growing need for music and video storage on PCs and consumer electronics devices. To meet that need, storage vendors are turning to new recording technologies. The first of these, perpendicular recording, will debut from Toshiba this year.

Hitachi's 500GB drive will be available in two versions: a $500 drive featuring the older parallel ATA interface and an 8MB data buffer, and a $520 model with a 16MB buffer that uses the 3-gigabits-per-second Serial ATA II interface (which is backward-compatible with the 1.5-gbps SATA interface). Test units were not available at press time, but shipping versions should be ready in the second quarter of this year. Hitachi estimates that the five-platter 500GB drives will be able to store up to 56 hours of HDTV depending on compression rates.
Source: PC World

Comments

  • RWBRWB Icrontian
    edited March 2005
    So what's next when the current HDD technology can't handle it? Never heard of perpendicular recording... what is it and how's it work? Most importantly.... is it a solid state storage type :D
  • primesuspectprimesuspect Beepin n' Boopin Detroit, MI Icrontian
    edited March 2005
    I remember the LAST time Hitachi/IBM tried a revolutionary recording technology.... It was called "pixie dust"..... :shakehead

    anybody remember happened with THAT mess? :rant:
  • DanGDanG I AM CANADIAN Icrontian
    edited March 2005
    I just can't respect Hitachi when it comed to desktop drives, too many bad memories from the Deathstar days...
  • yaggayagga Havn't you heard? ... New
    edited March 2005
    I'm so happy I never lived those...
  • TheSmJTheSmJ
    edited March 2005
    It what IBM who created the "Deathstar" we all know and love. IBM sold their HDD division to Hitachi after that.

    What I'm wondering is why Hitachi didn't dump the Deskstar name by now. All the bad press from the past kinda blew it.
  • TheBaronTheBaron Austin, TX
    edited March 2005
    in all honesty, for 10 years or so all major hard drive advancements happened through IBM drives. they made some drives with reliability issues granted, but that doesn't mean that new technologies out of hitachi's HDD division won't be something to look forward to
  • CyrixInsteadCyrixInstead Stoke-on-Trent, England Icrontian
    edited March 2005
    What's the pixie dust thing prime?

    ~Cyrix
  • TheBaronTheBaron Austin, TX
    edited March 2005
    http://news.com.com/2100-1001-257943.html?legacy=cnet
  • lemonlimelemonlime Canada Member
    edited April 2005
    At work, we had over 100 Dell C600 Latitude laptops. I think there are only about 2 or 3 of those laptops remaining with travelstar drives. All of the others failed miserably. Sometimes we caught them early, and were able to get the data off, other times, they crashed so hard that we had to send off-site for recovery. Dell never admitted that this was a 'common' issue, and would not let us defensively replace all of these drives early. They had to have some kind of 'proof' that the drive was about to fail before they would RMA. "Sir, could you hold the phone up to the laptop so I can hear this terrible clicking noise you are describing" :shakehead
  • RWBRWB Icrontian
    edited April 2005
    TheBaron wrote:
    http://news.com.com/2100-1001-257943.html?legacy=cnet

    OMG! I remember seeing the IBM commercial for that! I thought it was just made up crap for fun or something.... pixie dust. heh, funny name :D
Sign In or Register to comment.