Hitachi's New 4TB Hard Disk Drive - Yours for $377...

[labs23]

Hitachi Global Storage Technologies has quietly started to ship its hard disk drive with 4TB capacity with 7200rpm spindle speed. The new Deskstar 7K4000 hard drive weds extreme capacity with high performance and will likely become popular among enthusiasts this year.

The latest Hitachi Deskstar 7K4000 drive (HDS724040ALE640) boasts 4TB capacity and uses five previous-generation 800GB platters with 446Gb/square inch areal density, Serial ATA-600 interface, 64MB cache as well as 7200rpm spindle speed. The new hard disk drives use advanced 4K format.

Source:
http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/storage...isk_Drive.html

I want one!

[BoredByLife]

5 platters, no thank you

[Kain665]

5 platters? Deathstar...

[N19h7m4r3]

5 platters? Deathstar...

Never forget!

[BeepBeep2]

5 platters? Deathstar...

What did you expect???
Those are 800GB platters in there! *facepalm*
I own one of the 750GB single-platter Deskstar, extremely quiet and fast drive.
I guess you expected a 4 x 1TB/platter drive.

Someone take a screenshot, or sig me, I'm with Particle on this one.

Man no kidding Pipi.

No real change in gaming performance with SSD vs HD... please, so much miss information. Levels load in the blink of an eye with SSD's.

I have been using SSD's for a long time and hate running a machine based on HD's anymore. Prices for them are not that bad now a days vs what they used to be. A 230gb SSD is plenty big enough for OS + Apps + Games, I mean unless you want your entire library of games installed all the time.

I love it when people run Raid 0's with large number of HD's. Thats just waiting for problems to happen, then have fun recovering your data. Even tho my current Raid 0 is 7x 32gb SSD's it backs up so fast with Arconis to a 1TB drive I don't even notice it in the back ground. I would rather just have 1x 230gb SSD's now, just less stuff to worry about for everyday rig.

As if MLC SSD's are more reliable. (...and totally as recoverable, right?)

What are these levels? Some games benefit, some do not.

[3lfk1ng]

Mechanical HDD's are dead to me. So slow, so sluggish.

[crash5s]

Mechanical HDD's are dead to me. So slow, so sluggish.

Great for larger storage though! I've got a 10tb array at home, and it's fairly full.

Some people have LOT's of data. You want all your movies, music, pictures, and other items on a home NAS so all your devices can use it? That'll cost you a kidney to do it on SSD.

[TurboDiv]

Mechanical HDD's are dead to me. So slow, so sluggish.

Check some benchmarks for gaming performance between SSD and fast HDD. The difference is not worth the premium price for a SSD in terms of game load times and size. That's why any sensible gamer would get a sizeable 1TB+ HDD to store all games and a smaller SSD for OS/Programs. When 1TB SSDs fall in price in the future, then it would be the smarter choice.

[SexyMF]

Check some benchmarks for gaming performance between SSD and fast HDD. The difference is not worth the premium price for a SSD in terms of game load times and size. That's why any sensible gamer would get a sizeable 1TB+ HDD to store all games and a smaller SSD for OS/Programs. When 1TB SSDs fall in price in the future, then it would be the smarter choice.

No spin up time is really good. No noise, low power, quicker installation of software. No issues about fragmentation. Seeking large files works so much better than mechanical drive.

I'm happy we have both technologies advancing.

[3lfk1ng]

@TurboDiv
When Windows 7 is up in 25seconds and I can be inside my TF2 server in under a minute, the SSD is clearly doing it's job. I'm not even on RAID 0 yet as Trim is not yet supported and once that driver is released and I convert to Raid O, that will double my throughput. In TF2, when the level changes, I am the first person to load into the next map because of my 550mb/s capable SSD, it's certainly not because of my sluggish 15mb/s internet connection and higher latency and it is definitely not my processor as a few other people on my server have far superior processors. My SSD drive has an impact on every single game that I have in my library, don't try to tell me otherwise while I am experiencing it first hand.

As for "premium price" some are mentioning; some of us buy slow inexpensive Hondas, other more fortunately individuals buy a $300,000 Ferrari. Is the difference in speed worth the premium price?
On local streets, slightly. (Due to instant acceleration of the Ferrari and the SSD. The Honda has a slower acceleration time, just like how the HDD has to spin up)
On the race track, yes. (In every aspect, speed, acceleration, turning, braking)
The performance will vary depending on the situation but the Ferrari is certainly faster either way. In my opinion and personal experience, SDD's are totally worth the premium price.

@Levish
I completely realize that not everyone is going to use "the cloud" for storage. The are far too many government regulations and privacy risks, I understand that. But we are the enthusiasts - a rare breed. General consumers will more than likely eat up the chance to enjoy this "cloud" idea until the government actively let's consumers know that all of their information is being scrutinized. Look at Google and their recent privacy changes. Look at Google's Chromium OS. Their entire success is built on the selling of what general consumers consider privacy. Not everyone is too happy about that either.

@Origin_Unknown
As for a possible Dropbox closure, the users of Dropbox are (for the lack of a better word) uneducated if they aren't backing up their data elsewhere. That's kind of like users relying on just their mechanical hdd for all of their data and then getting pissed when it fails and they lose everything. It is never safe to completely rely on one storage solution but most consumers don't think about things like that ahead of time.

@Caparroz
As for streaming quality. Spotify premium actually sounds pretty damn good in fact, it sounds even better than all the songs downloaded from iTunes, I think MOG is the only comparable service in terms of audio quality. Spotify premium uses a 320 kbps bitrate (they call it Q9) at this time. That means every track is just about CD quality (384 Kbps). To put Spotify's music quality into perspective a fully downloaded track from iTunes is just 160 kbps vs Spotify's 320kbps streaming. Depending on the soundcard (especially an integrate sound card)most users will not even notice the difference and it is certainly worth the $10/mo for an unlimited access to a sizeable library.

Netflix and HULU will never top the quality of Blu-Ray but you can bet that when it is illegally ripped onto your HDD or perhaps you get a copy via Bit-Torrent, it's quality is severely degraded to the point that most people's video collection (computer storage based) is of quality similar to that of Netflix or HULU streaming, if not worse.

@endlesszeal
Bandwidth will soon become a thing of the past. The internet grows faster every year and as companies compete for your business you can bet that we will all benefit from it. 802.11ac is just around the corner (you can bet Apple be the first to adapt it in every device, Trendnet and Buffalo already offer 802.11ac routers) and what is after 4G will bring our mobile phones out of the dark ages.

Quick summary: The point is, our world is changing rapidly. We have many choices when it comes to storage mediums. Internet is getting faster and more regulated, consumers aren't complaining about privacy issues as much as they should, and people need to learn to not become to heavily reliant on a single storage solution.

[naokaji]

Bandwidth will soon become a thing of the past. The internet grows faster every year

Tell that to the ISPs who instead of upgrading their infrastructure just keep increasing the advertised download speed and then in return to make that high advertised speed possible slap insane restrictions on the users, plus upload speeds are still way too pathetic for the cloud to work, hell, even uploading a couple photos takes ages still, you can't expect people with such restrictions to shift several TB of data to online storage solutions.

[3lfk1ng]

Yes, throttling is a major issue but keep in mind that mass consumer internet has only been big for a full 15-20years, we have certainly come a long way in such a short period of time.
Upload a file to a Dropbox account with Wireshark running to monitor the traffic throughput, I was actually pleasantly surprised to see how quickly it uploaded, their service is really well done.

[Caparroz]

@Caparroz
As for streaming quality. Spotify premium actually sounds pretty damn good in fact, it sounds even better than all the songs downloaded from iTunes, I think MOG is the only comparable service in terms of audio quality. Spotify premium uses a 320 kbps bitrate (they call it Q9) at this time. That means every track is just about CD quality (384 Kbps). To put Spotify's music quality into perspective a fully downloaded track from iTunes is just 160 kbps vs Spotify's 320kbps streaming. Depending on the soundcard (especially an integrate sound card)most users will not even notice the difference and it is certainly worth the $10/mo for an unlimited access to a sizeable library.

Netflix and HULU will never top the quality of Blu-Ray but you can bet that when it is illegally ripped onto your HDD or perhaps you get a copy via Bit-Torrent, it's quality is severely degraded to the point that most people's video collection (computer storage based) is of quality similar to that of Netflix or HULU streaming, if not worse.

Erm... no.

384kbps is nowhere near CD quality. Not even close a standard Walmart cd, not even mentioning a well mastered CD. Heck, I've got so much storage bought for almost free (before Thai floods) that I don't even bother with flacs anymore, most of my collection is in .wav. (I have my issues with flac but that's another topic)

As for video, if I buy a BD disc I'll rip 1:1 and that's perfectly legal where I live. As for "degraded quality" offered over torrent, usenet or whatever, I sugest stop reading Hollywood press releases.

[[XC] Lead Head]

@Caparroz
As for streaming quality. Spotify premium actually sounds pretty damn good in fact, it sounds even better than all the songs downloaded from iTunes, I think MOG is the only comparable service in terms of audio quality. Spotify premium uses a 320 kbps bitrate (they call it Q9) at this time. That means every track is just about CD quality (384 Kbps).

CDs are 1411 kbps raw PCM. No compression at all.

Netflix and HULU will never top the quality of Blu-Ray but you can bet that when it is illegally ripped onto your HDD or perhaps you get a copy via Bit-Torrent, it's quality is severely degraded to the point that most people's video collection (computer storage based) is of quality similar to that of Netflix or HULU streaming, if not worse.

Netflix and Hulu video quality is atrocious. It looks terrible on a 15.3" Laptop screen, let alone stretching that picture to a 48" HDTV. Blu-Ray discs are already encoded in H.264 (or sometimes MPEG2, which you can just convert to H.264 afterwards), and the quality would still be great, with reasonable file sizes given the content.

Bandwidth will soon become a thing of the past. The internet grows faster every year and as companies compete for your business you can bet that we will all benefit from it. 802.11ac is just around the corner (you can bet Apple be the first to adapt it in every device, Trendnet and Buffalo already offer 802.11ac routers) and what is after 4G will bring our mobile phones out of the dark ages.

802.11c is till ~1.5 years away from the standard being finalized, and the IEEE doesn't expect widespread use until 2015. 802.11ac still isn't relevant to internet streaming as the vast majority of American internet can't even max 54g, let alone n or ac.

Bandwidth becoming a thing of the past? The opposite if anything. Cloud-based computing and more streaming than ever gives ISPs an incentive to create monthly data caps. They'll be able to charge a premium for uncapped (or very high capped) internet, for users that have a lot of stuff on the "cloud". Many ISPs are still uncapped right now because there just isn't enough data being sent to warrant it.

Your average modern mechanical harddrive can write close (or above) to 100MB/s. That is 800mbit/s. Unless I can get gigabit internet sometime soon, the "cloud" is useless to me.

[TurboDiv]

@TurboDiv
When Windows 7 is up in 25seconds and I can be inside my TF2 server in under a minute, the SSD is clearly doing it's job. I'm not even on RAID 0 yet as Trim is not yet supported and once that driver is released and I convert to Raid O, that will double my throughput. In TF2, when the level changes, I am the first person to load into the next map because of my 550mb/s capable SSD, it's certainly not because of my sluggish 15mb/s internet connection and higher latency and it is definitely not my processor as a few other people on my server have far superior processors. My SSD drive has an impact on every single game that I have in my library, don't try to tell me otherwise while I am experiencing it first hand.

As for "premium price" some are mentioning; some of us buy slow inexpensive Hondas, other more fortunately individuals buy a $300,000 Ferrari. Is the difference in speed worth the premium price?
On local streets, slightly. (Due to instant acceleration of the Ferrari and the SSD. The Honda has a slower acceleration time, just like how the HDD has to spin up)
On the race track, yes. (In every aspect, speed, acceleration, turning, braking)
The performance will vary depending on the situation but the Ferrari is certainly faster either way. In my opinion and personal experience, SDD's are totally worth the premium price.

Ohh but OK. I am willing to put your TF2 server and your PC to the test. You load up with your fast SSD with 600 mb/sec and i will load with my WD black 1TB hdd. I can almost guarantee that you will be maximum 1-2 sec faster, not even. I will PM you my Steam ID and at our conveniences create a TF2 server and change the levels a few times... For a 1-2 second faster load times its hardly a Ferrari - at least in terms of price it is, and for OS drive i have already mentioned it is way better than a mechanical drive and definitely recommend it to everybody.


PS: Here is a better representation of my point of view, given a finite budget:

Slow SSD vs slow HDD in game load times
The bottom line is that you are way better off to throw the "Ferrari" money for a decent video card/CPU/smaller OS SSD and get a faster mechanical drive if gaming is priority. The end result will be 10 fold better experience than an expensive(600mb/sec) 200GB+ SSD based gaming system. Now, if you can afford all of this(unlimited budget), your way is obviously a better way since you will be able to get a 200GB+ 600mb/sec SSD + Cross 7970 + 3-4 monitors. Im not arguing its slow or anything, im just saying that for the advantages of ~5 seconds faster load times in games the premium $ is just not worth it at the current prices of SSDs. Again, strictly for game load times.

[Unoid]

@endlesszeal
Bandwidth will soon become a thing of the past. The internet grows faster every year and as companies compete for your business you can bet that we will all benefit from it. 802.11ac is just around the corner (you can bet Apple be the first to adapt it in every device, Trendnet and Buffalo already offer 802.11ac routers) and what is after 4G will bring our mobile phones out of the dark ages.

4g? you kidding me? people have to pay 20-30$/mo for 2-3GB of data on mobile networks.

[3lfk1ng]

Even then I have no need for large amounts of storage. However, I will admit that my wife needs the storage capacity as she is a web designer. She is sitting on 14TB's and we just recently purchased a QNAP as well (has yet to arrive).

As far as my media goes:
Music - Grooveshark, or Spotify Premium - $10/mo
Movies - Blu-Ray or Netflix/ Hulu - $20/mo

The days of needing lots of storage for media are almost to an end for most people. Soon everything will be in the cloud, everyone will even have a personal Dropbox. I love the progress that OnLive is making too. For a majority of people, this will help bring PC games to people who cannot afford nice gaming computers but have a decent internet connection or a mobile device, without the need to install 10-20GB/game.

[endlesszeal]

Even then I have no need for large amounts of storage. However, I will admit that my wife needs the storage capacity as she is a web designer. She is sitting on 14TB's and we just recently purchased a QNAP as well (has yet to arrive).

As far as my media goes:
Music - Grooveshark, or Spotify Premium - $10/mo
Movies - Blu-Ray or Netflix/ Hulu - $20/mo

The days of needing lots of storage for media are almost to an end for most people. Soon everything will be in the cloud, everyone will even have a personal Dropbox. I love the progress that OnLive is making too. For a majority of people, this will help bring PC games to people who cannot afford nice gaming computers but have a decent internet connection or a mobile device, without the need to install 10-20GB/game.

I dont see cloud taking off until they remove these bandwidth caps or raise them. also, i would love not to share my personal pictures and movies with the world, if by chance these cloud storages get hacked.

For me, I need a lot of space because of all the foreign material i watch. streaming quality isnt good enough and it seems like more and more of the streaming sites are getting shut down.

[Caparroz]

Even then I have no need for large amounts of storage. However, I will admit that my wife needs the storage capacity as she is a web designer. She is sitting on 14TB's and we just recently purchased a QNAP as well (has yet to arrive).

As far as my media goes:
Music - Grooveshark, or Spotify Premium - $10/mo
Movies - Blu-Ray or Netflix/ Hulu - $20/mo

The days of needing lots of storage for media are almost to an end for most people. Soon everything will be in the cloud, everyone will even have a personal Dropbox. I love the progress that OnLive is making too. For a majority of people, this will help bring PC games to people who cannot afford nice gaming computers but have a decent internet connection or a mobile device, without the need to install 10-20GB/game.

If you're ok with horrible quality music and video I think that's fine but ther are plenty of people who need tons of storage space to justify their A/V gear.

[Levish]

The days of needing lots of storage for media are almost to an end for most people. Soon everything will be in the cloud, everyone will even have a personal Dropbox. I love the progress that OnLive is making too. For a majority of people, this will help bring PC games to people who cannot afford nice gaming computers but have a decent internet connection or a mobile device, without the need to install 10-20GB/game.

There will always be people like me who do not want to put all their trust / everything "in the cloud", some people like to know that

- I'm running a full backup to my drive here, I have X number of days / weeks that I can refer back to
- I have 1Gbps access or better to everything here ANYTIME regardless of connectivity to interwebs and there is no subscription worries

Yes I may also backup "to the cloud" but I will never trust my data to a company that I cannot scrutinize.

[Aberration]

The network infrastructure for most is going to limit that.

[NEOAethyr]

4tb, nice but horrible brand name of drive.
I've seen 3 personally die within a year when they were going with the ibm name (1 mine, 2 of my buddies).
Never again.

Besides, $400 for drive, no way.
My 2x1tb array cost me around $160.
I've love to jump up to 8tb's or so, but at the current prices I won't be doing that any time soon .
2tb's is just not enough for me anymore.

I hate dvd's and such, I don't think I'll ever burn another dvd.
Not when I can buy a drive and have it not beable to burn any disc's anymore after just a few months! (had 3 dvd drives do this to me, a diff buddy of mine had a dozen diff drives do the same to him)
So no more disc's for me, so I need drives, but at the current prices, I'll just forgo it for now.

Edit:
And btw, ssd's aren't that good when it comes to random data supposedly.
In theory about 45m a sec, in real life, 3xmegs per sec?, supposedly that's what they do.
A 2xr0 setup would outperform a single ssd when it came down to it.
Last time I went with 2 drives in a array, next time 3 or 4 in a array raid 0.
Performance wouldn't be all that bad for storage, it's not like booting up on a sdd or anything but still reasonable.

[Pipi]

Edit:
And btw, ssd's aren't that good when it comes to random data supposedly.
In theory about 45m a sec, in real life, 3xmegs per sec?, supposedly that's what they do.
A 2xr0 setup would outperform a single ssd when it came down to it.
Last time I went with 2 drives in a array, next time 3 or 4 in a array raid 0.
Performance wouldn't be all that bad for storage, it's not like booting up on a sdd or anything but still reasonable.

Would it? How much do you think the mechanical drives can read and write at, when it comes to random files? Do you think they can fill the SATA connection? Wrong, random data is where SSDs are at. HDDs fail miserably when it comes to random since, at the very least, they have to move their heads like crazy, to access those randomly thrown around bits. Yes, SSDs suffer greatly, when it comes to random data, yet not nearly as much as mechanical drives.

Check your facts.

[Origin_Unknown]

Even then I have no need for large amounts of storage. However, I will admit that my wife needs the storage capacity as she is a web designer. She is sitting on 14TB's and we just recently purchased a QNAP as well (has yet to arrive).

As far as my media goes:
Music - Grooveshark, or Spotify Premium - $10/mo
Movies - Blu-Ray or Netflix/ Hulu - $20/mo

The days of needing lots of storage for media are almost to an end for most people. Soon everything will be in the cloud, everyone will even have a personal Dropbox. I love the progress that OnLive is making too. For a majority of people, this will help bring PC games to people who cannot afford nice gaming computers but have a decent internet connection or a mobile device, without the need to install 10-20GB/game.

not long till dropbox feels the rath of the recent storage closures

[Computurd]

for enterprise this is actually kinda bad news. with increasing capacities comes increasing issues. more data exposed to failures in a single blow, and more importantly huge super long rebuild times. and huge arrays that are hard to manage...

i want 10 of them personally though LOL