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

[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.

[Mech0z]

Bah cheapest price in denmark is 505$ with taxes atm, hope it drops soon or pushes the 3tb drives down in price. Wonder whats taking WD and seagate so long to release internal drives (Seagate have had 4tb for ½ a year now as external if I am not mistaken)

[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.

[WangChung]

Been sort of irked at Usenet lately, idiots keep loading locked RARs.

In light of all the government and corporate maneuvering going on lately, there's no way I'd trust to put stuff into "the Cloud." Plus, there's some stuff I don't want up there because there's things I don't want people to see (ahem, home movies). I don't trust people NOT to look at my content, whatever it is. I've worked desktop support/admin long enough that everyone is a voyeur at heart, we all want to take a peek.

Anyway, let's try to shove this derailed train back on track. I'm disappointed that Hitachi, the first to make a 1TB platter still insists on using previous generation tech. If they would push products out with the latest and greatest (four 1TB platters) and subsidize the price just a little, it would force the industry to follow suit and give some good competition and prices.

[Particle]

I appreciate their current approach, actually. I'm all for giving us [under normal conditions] very affordable hard drives using five, one-gen-old platters. There are more expensive options out there if you want them. 7Kx000 however has been about a good middle ground for the last few generations.

[[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.

[saint-francis]

This "cloud" argument simply doesn't hold water in a lot of circumstances. It would take me months to upload my 20 odd TB of data to "the cloud" and then I'd have to wait an eternity again every time I wanted to manipulate my data.

EDIT:

And I'd spend more time on this site if it weren't dog slow. It took about 2 minutes to post that. WTF?

[lutjens]

It ticks me off that they're using 800GB platters, when they have the 1TB platters available. We could have 5TB drives right now.

I guess they have to milk it...er us for the usual 1-2 year interval...

We still don't have enterprise-quality 4TB drives...so it'll be 2015 before we see enterprise 5TB drives...

[Bobsama]

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

Enterprise isn't anywhere near this market. These are consumer drives--enterprises serious about storage would use fully qualified 15k SAS drives and advanced RAID. The real problem, in my opinion, is that transfer speeds haven't increased at the same rate as capacities.

Anyways, I think I'll settle for another 4 Samsung F4EG 2TB's (for a 6-drive RAID5) and another WD Black 1TB (for a 2-drive RAID1).

[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.

[Levish]

The real problem, in my opinion, is that transfer speeds haven't increased at the same rate as capacities.

They've been making some strides. I still have some old IDE drives that would struggle to give over 40MBps, while the latest and greatest SAS drives can do over 200MBps.

Sure its not like flash drives going from the same 30-40MBps to over 550MBps (and in a shorter period) but its different technology.

[lutjens]

I appreciate their current approach, actually. I'm all for giving us [under normal conditions] very affordable hard drives using five, one-gen-old platters. There are more expensive options out there if you want them. 7Kx000 however has been about a good middle ground for the last few generations.

I wouldn't mind paying more for 1TB platters in enterprise-quality drives.

[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.

[NEOAethyr]

There just price gouging, western digital were the only ones affected by the flood as far as I know.
What they are doing is price fixing and keeping the opponents in the game, that's if they don't actually own the company...

Take direct tv for example.
Owned by hughes network, which owns primestar, dish, directtv, etc etc.

I won't buy any disk baised drive when stuff like this is happening in the market.

[Levish]

There just price gouging, western digital were the only ones affected by the flood as far as I know.
What they are doing is price fixing and keeping the opponents in the game, that's if they don't actually own the company...

Take direct tv for example.
Owned by hughes network, which owns primestar, dish, directtv, etc etc.

I won't buy any disk baised drive when stuff like this is happening in the market.

Same, it may be Tin Foil Hat(y) but I can't help but think the whole speculation thing (what happened to oil prices in the US a couple years ago) is spreading to more and more industries.