Hitachi breakthrough: 4TB disks by 2011

When Hitachi -- the first disk manufacturer to go perpendicular and subsequently break the 1TB consumer disk drive barrier -- speaks about advances in hard disk technology, you'd be wise to listen. Today they're touting the world's smallest read-head technology for HDDs. The bold claim? 4TB desktop (3.5-inch) and 1TB laptop (2.5-inch) drives within the next 4 years. The new recording heads are more than 2x smaller than existing gear or about 2,000 times smaller than a human hair. Hmmm, Samsung may have to update their SSD vs. HDD graph after this, eh?

[Ashraf @ Oct 15th 2007 3:27AM]

what the hell.

thinner than hair?

wow. technology these days

mee new laptop (HP Pavilion DV9610US) will soon be out of date next two months

[JDizzle @ Oct 15th 2007 11:03PM]

It'll happen before then, trust me.

[Julian Bond @ Oct 15th 2007 3:44AM]

And 1.8" drives? 2011, iPod Classic 750Mb anyone?

[Andrew Ries @ Oct 15th 2007 12:12PM]

fail

[Jack @ Oct 15th 2007 6:31AM]

awfully small for an iPod no?:p

[Julian Bond @ Oct 15th 2007 7:19AM]

Doh! Should be 640Gb if current 1.8" to 2.5" proportions remain the same.

[Jagannath A @ Oct 15th 2007 3:44AM]

fail

[Charles Han @ Oct 15th 2007 3:46AM]

hahaha more room for pr0n whooppieee!!! btw its awesome when drivers get bigger and bigger cause smaller capacity drives drop their prices substantially, hehe time to bulk up on 1 tb drives by the time 4 tb rolls out!

[mushrooshi @ Oct 15th 2007 8:23AM]

More like room for pirating games and getting ISOs and Axxo's DVD rips. Oh, and thw lovely Adobe 25 GB CS6 suite.

[trancer @ Oct 15th 2007 3:52AM]

2011? seems sooo far away.

[I LOVE THE CAPS LOCK KEY @ Oct 15th 2007 4:51AM]

Not that far off, that's 3 years and 1.5 months away. Untill then expect 2TB drives to be out by the end of 2008/early 2009.

[pryam44 @ Oct 16th 2007 9:01PM]

are u dumb its 3 years 2.5 months, unless theyrs only gonna b 11 months in 2010, which i would not mind since id get my drive faster

[tekdroid @ Oct 15th 2007 5:32AM]

i would be really excited if removable opticals moved half as fast as the storage gains we are seeing with hard drives.

[thethirdmoose @ Oct 15th 2007 7:10AM]

no one will ever need more than 680k.

[I LOVE THE CAPS LOCK KEY @ Oct 15th 2007 7:57AM]

First the urban legend is 640k not 680k.

Second in an interview with Wired Magazine, William Gates then CEO of Microsoft stated:

QUESTION: "I read in a newspaper that in l981 you said '640K of memory should be enough for anybody.' What did you mean when you said this?"

ANSWER: "I've said some stupid things and some wrong things, but not that. No one involved in computers would ever say that a certain amount of memory is enough for all time."

Gates goes on a bit about 16-bit computers and megabytes of logical address space, but the kid's question (will this boy never work at Microsoft?) clearly rankled the billionaire visionary.

"Meanwhile, I keep bumping into that silly quotation attributed to me that says 640K of memory is enough. There's never a citation; the quotation just floats like a rumor, repeated again and again."

Silly quotations do have a way of floating like rumors.

Well, the truth starts here.

He never said it. No free software.



Third, it's getting kind of old every time someone brings up the question is this enough (KB, MB, TB, PB, EB, or ZB), that some will with out a doubt will bring up the old 640k rumor. It's almost as annoying and as tired out as the it's my overlord, that will blend while playing Doom.

[I LOVE THE CAPS LOCK KEY @ Oct 15th 2007 7:58AM]

Forgot the corresponding URL for my statment.

http://www.wired.com/politics/law/news/1997/01/1484

[Wwhat @ Oct 15th 2007 1:38PM]

Haha, yeah and bush never said saddam had WMD right? ok sure.

[I LOVE THE CAPS LOCK KEY @ Oct 15th 2007 5:00PM]

@Wwhat

Nancy Pelosi, John Edwards, Hillary Clinton, John Kerry and Bill Clinton (during his Presidency) all said Saddam had WMDs.

[pete @ Oct 15th 2007 7:26AM]

If the disk arrives in 2011 it will take until 2013 to format it!

PJ

[jonouk @ Oct 15th 2007 11:07AM]

then don't use ntfs. simple

[Wwhat @ Oct 15th 2007 1:40PM]

So what do you suggest he uses? some magical format that doesn't need formatting? please link us to such a thing.

[Wwhat @ Oct 15th 2007 1:43PM]

Although obviously when the head is twice as small the data is twice as close together meaning the amount of data that can be written as the disc spins is double, meaning the drive will be twice as fast too.
Perhaps they should highlight that feature rather than the space it adds.

[Grant @ Oct 15th 2007 5:17PM]

FAT16 FTW!
lol

[snrub @ Oct 15th 2007 7:59AM]

Well they don't actually sell 1TB drives currently, more like 960GB.

[Eric @ Oct 15th 2007 9:16AM]

How about making them read/write a little faster first? Or encryption built into the controller instead of in an OS afterthought?

Besides, if current trends continue with flash, it should be competitive with HDDs by then.

[kevjohn @ Oct 15th 2007 9:35AM]

This will be just what I need to store my prons.

[Wwhat @ Oct 15th 2007 1:44PM]

Pr0n will only get higher resolution and so require more space though :/

[stephen @ Oct 15th 2007 4:41PM]

@Wwhat: you make that sound like a bad thing. *shocked*

[laurie @ Oct 15th 2007 10:28AM]

Whoopee bloody do. I'd be bloody dissapointed if there weren't bigger disks around in 4 years time! 4tb is only 4x the size of the biggest disk available TODAY FFS!

[steve @ Oct 15th 2007 11:02AM]

Samsung doesn't need to update the graph because it discusses the cost / GB, not capacity

[jonouk @ Oct 15th 2007 11:05AM]

i sure hope they sort out the problem of thermal stability of the recording medium now that they are trying to pack more data onto smaller areas. 1bit per molecule would be awesome if they could do that too

[Froggy @ Oct 15th 2007 11:10AM]

I thought we doubled capacity every 18 months. wouldn't a 4TB drive come closer to say, 2010? maybe even late 2009. Maybe they meant to say FY 2011? that would put them into late 2010.

either way, 4TB... wow. Put 4 of those in RAID.

[craig @ Oct 15th 2007 12:39PM]

My reaction too. All they are saying is that there will be more of the same for the next few years. Not a "bold claim" at all.

What's more interesting is if and when capacity and demand cause a market shift toward 2.5" drives for desktops and servers. Once upon a time there were many that argued that 3.5" may work in desktops but servers would always be 5.25.

[Dan Isaacs @ Oct 16th 2007 9:13PM]

Go ahead. And let me know how those rebuilds go.

Fact is, with bit error rates, you are more than likely to never successfully rebuild a 5+1 RAID5 RAID Group with a 4TB drive.

[DjDATZ @ Oct 15th 2007 11:46AM]

ummm...I just saw a 1TB external drive at FutureShop yesterday...how is a 4x larger drive over 3 years away?

http://www.futureshop.ca/catalog/proddetail.asp?sku_id=0665000FS10091359&catid=23795&logon=&langid=EN

[Matthew Hilario @ Oct 15th 2007 1:08PM]

by 2011 i'll have a ssd attached to my brian.

[miklnk @ Oct 15th 2007 2:30PM]

This is to the first post. I hate when people see new tech and think what the own will be out of date in two months or whatever. THEY even said 4 years. You can't take a breakthrough in a lab and turn it around in two months.

[Kaminix @ Oct 15th 2007 3:37PM]

Looking forward to running badblocks on this one, took about half a day to do on my 500GB. :)