Seagate rolls out a 3/4 TB HDD(750 GB)!!

I was just reading the USA Today articles, and ran across the fact that Seagate just unveiled a 750 GB HDD for PC manufacturers (as opposed to the old 500 GB that we're used to seeing). Not too sure how long Dell, Gateway, HP, Sony, or Alienware have to get their hands on this. This article was quite interesting, I was just reading that at work this evening on my break. Can't wait to see if Western Digital or Maxtor comes out and breaks the terabyte barrier within the next year or two.

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/products/2006-04-26-seagate-drive_x.htm

Already got 650gb of space, so I doubt I'll be getting one any time soon. Maybe in a few years when they're cheaper or one of my hard drives dies.

Jeez, I can't imagine using that. Well, I can but I still have a hard time using up my 80GB drive.

You could store a lot of pr0n on that.

You'd have to be pretty stupid to have one drive of that size. The potential for catastrophic data loss if the thing fails doesn't bear thinking about.

Several smaller units are a much safer option.

Yup, definately... lost one HD years ago and everything with it. Now I have 60GB OS HD and two identical (not raided) 120GB HDs for data (gfx, code, reference, etc other than apps that are on my OS HD).

Which is why I have three hard drives.

Do hard drives fail more often than they used to? The only hard drives I've ever owned were a 2GB & a 4GB for my old Celeron 366Mhz PC - used them for about 5 years with no problems, then picked up a pair of used 18GB hard drives which have also given me no problems (had them since middle of 2004) and on my laptop have an 80GB hard drive (split into partitions of about 40GB each) which thankfully has never had any problems.

My old house mates have had all sorts of issues with their hard drives - which have been 100GB+ in size, repeatedly failing. Are larger hard drives more prone to failure?

Hard drives these days do seem to fail more often - probably because of pushing the 'technology' of HDs too hard. They are mechanical devices, after all, so they WILL fail at some point.

I have an 80GB drive and have only used 5GB (including OS). :/

Great, now it will only take 8 hours to format that drive!

I agree with the rest of you. My home pc has a 120 gig drive.

I have 400 gig of storage on my file server (split up between many smaller drives). I simply do my backups from my dev machine to there (and from my web server to there), and from there on to tape drive (the web stuff and code from the dev machine).

Having large drives is ok if you have 3 or more to create a decent raid. Even then, your taking a huge risk on new technology.....

Usually when they announce their ultra huge drive "hey, it stores a Terabyte, all on solid state", it tends to have many issues out of the box... Never rely on new technology.
;-)

Well, that all depends on what Vista's standards are going to be, remember, the OS requires 1 GB of RAM, but as far as HDD space, this may play a significant role...

Content is getting bigger. It's a good idea that hard drives get bigger earlier than the need.

Considering my 10mb (yes, 10 whore freakin megs) HD still works, and that I've had 2 80gbs fail within a 2yrs of purchase, I'd have to say so. ;/

I'd have to agree with Gfk on the size thing, well, unless HD-DVD or Blu-Ray Burners were available at a reasonable price to the consumer by then.

When I bought my first CD-burner, my HD was 1.5GB. And during my first burnt CD at someone else's system my HD was 420MB. That was all nice, you could backup your whole HD contents at once, at a CD-r of -admittedly- $12 orso.. but heck, it was secured!
Right now, I've about 400GB worth o' harddisks in my main PC, about 150 in my B-system, and 50GB in my notebook.
And where's my backup medium of, say, 100GB??
HD-development goes fast, but it also goes way ahead of the backup-industry, which is not good. With 750GB figures a CD-r is insane, and even a DVD-r of 4.5GB is a bit narrow already.
Honestly tho, what do ppl put on them? I could imagine for myself: samples, instrument, all my multitracks, tryouts, takes etc., even then 750GB is massive. But ordinary people? Would they store all their movies on this HD, rather than burning each movie to a DVD-r?
Video-editing perhaps? Iirc 1 minute at broadcast-quality is about 1GB .. that's a potential 750minutes then, and only if you really care about broadcastquality! Whoever needs over 12 hours of broadcastquality video?? Not Joe Public who'll edit some wedding-video!

Even then, to back up 750gb of data you'd still need 15 Blu-Ray DVDs, or 25 HD-DVDs, and that's to say nothing of the time it would take to do it.

I'm sure some P2P freak would love a HD of that size to keep his 24hr a day downloaded warez on.

With a 750mb Drive you *could* download a 700mb DVD Rip each day for a whole year and still have 500gb free, ouch! - A warez freaks dream I guess.

Or approx 192,000 MP3's (at 4mb each)
Or approx 4 million pr0n pics

yeah, a movie each day: a p2p freak's dream

a 750GB HD-crash without backup: a p2p freak's worst nightmare

I've already got 750gigs. Three drives, of varying sizes. Got about 80 gigs free. I save pretty much every video and picture and flash animation I like, encode and edit video, etc.

It's too much work to actually delete stuff. I have a download directory which is sorted by the type of application, but what do I need all those install programs for? Well, most I probably don't need, but what about that one that would be impossible to find, like the installed for that text adventure generator I used once to make an adventure about my freind in his apartment? I wouldn't want to delete that. And there's lots of other stuff like that too.

Also, I backup my stuff by coping it from one drive to another, so I just backed up all my BlitzMax stuff to my E drive, those backups take up about 2 gigs right now. Now that I have some free space again after installing that 250 gig drive over xmas, I guess I should back up some of the stuff I didn't have the space to backup before as well.

Ideally, I'd like to have 2x as much space so I could do one of those raid setups where you don't need to do backups because all the data gets mirrored. There's really no other way I could possibly make sure my whole system is backed up regularly. Luckilly for me I've never had a drive fail.

GFK, don't you mean catastrophic pr0n loss?

What you have on your hard drive is your business.

If I had a 750GB drive it would hold about 40 films (think about it).

It wouldn't be a catastrophic loss if it dies because, well, it's just some films. I'd probably have a backup of them anyways.

I'm using 1 300GB (Maxtor MaxLine III) drive at the moment and it's just about the right size for the stuff I do. Any more would be a waste.

anyone who is salivating at this should check out Buffalo's Terastation (1TB) or Terrastatio Pro (1.6TB) network attached storage devices. You can schedule backups, etc. to them and even attach more external drives via USB.

I thought about putting together a Thecus N4100 populated with 4x Western Digital RAID Edition 500GB drives (in a RAID5). Would be nice to be able to store things on there fairly securely.

Still, waste of money when it comes down to it. I might as well backup to DVD, like I normally do.

If I really need more storage at some point, I'll probably just add on another 300GB. Only having 1 drive in the PC is nice and quiet, but can be a pain if I want to join a load of 100MB files into a 20GB one (joining HDTV MPEG2). Would be much faster to go between drives.

Would be cool to have Ubuntu installed on one drive and Windows on the other as well.

But hey, I just spent out on a monitor and other things. No more upgrades for me for a good while :-/

Never had a drive fail me yet.

I've got my RAID drives in 5.25" noiseless cooling frames plus there's a number of other fans to help with keeping the case cooler. It doesn't need to be loud either. An auto fan controller (Hardcano 13) and big fans running at low rpm takes care of that. It's also in a Lian-Li full height aluminium tower which acts like a big heatsink too. This is also a filtered unit which stops the excessive dust problem caused through ventilation. I think a lot of problems can be caused by having a system in a mid tower case which is already running warm and then throwing in a bunch of hard drives right next to each other. Couple this with a year or two dust buildup and you're asking for trouble.

Sure, it costs a few bucks, but so does a few harddrives. Also, most of this cooling stuff (Fans, hardcano, tower, hd frames) can be taken to the next system I build.

All IMHO of course.

You could always buy 2 of those and mirror the lot !

am I the only person here with multi-terabytes? :)

Not unless you get a Dell XPS, that comes with RAID with 1 TB HDD space. Then again, that's why Dell bought out Alienware to have that cutting edge stuff... Looks like XPS will be the only gaming PC brand on the market before all is said and done :(. R.I.P. Compaq Gaming X PC (wish HP'd do far more with that one)... Well, I'm quite sure that with a RAID with the 750 GB HDDs, you could make 1.5 TB with two of those together. Not too sure how well that would do for you...

Nope, a lot less...
(How much depends on what type of RAID you're talking about.)

The only usefull thing I could think to store that much information would be to make your PC into an MP3 JUkebox. But still, that would leave 420GB of free space. THere's just no need to have that much space, more space, more clutter, easier to lose things

> the OS requires 1 GB of RAM

What a scary world we are about to live in.

You might say that you would never need that amount of space but I still remember a long time ago when I bought my first Hardrive.. if memory serves it was a whopping 10Mb. At the time I thought.. wow.. Im never gonna fill all that up !

Finally, I can make all my music into WAV files now, and still only use half the drive.

What's the cluster size on a drive that big? 1MB? :P

I use 64k clusters on all my drives... all 2TB of them. :)

How about a media server. Copy all your DVD's to the HD, hook it up to your TV, and you can browse & view your entire movie collection without swapping a single disk.

Related to that: if you have DVR software and a video capture card, you can capture many, many hours or video without the need for a huge stack of video tapes...

There's definitely uses... I'm chronically low on diskspace myself, with 440GB (across 4 drives)
I'd definitely wait and see how *reliable* these drives are, though... Especially since it's based around an entirely new principle (the perpendicular recording) and with the increased data density... That's a LOT of data to lose in one swoop. :-?

Remember the debacle when IBM first launched their 80GB line? the deathstar^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hdeskstar didn't work out too well...

xlsior: Good point. I'm not one for being an early adopter. Isn't there a rule of thumb about waiting either 6 months or one full product cycle before buying into new technology?

Lets just say you rarely want the version 1.0 when it comes to hardware. :-?

It just baffles the mind how many people were lining up in droves so they could be the first to get an xbox360 when they first came out. Too bad many of them had overheating problems.

Plus many of them had broken cases I think. I still haven't bought one -- just don't really care for another console yet. Especially considering the fact that my favorite genre is best-played on the PC.

I thought the topic title said
' sausage rolls out on a 3/4 TB HDD(750 GB)!!'