Seagate to unveil monster hard drives. 750 gigabytes!!

[Lefty Wilbury]

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12492893/

Seagate to unveil monster hard drives
Barracuda 7200.10 first to reach 750-gigabyte milestone

Updated: 7:49 a.m. ET April 26, 2006
SAN JOSE, Calif. - Seagate Technology LLC is beefing up the capacity of its hard disk drives to a whopping 750 gigabytes, offering consumers of digital media more storage for their computers than ever before.

The drive Seagate will introduce Wednesday, the Barracuda 7200.10, is the first computer desktop disk drive to hit the 750-gigabyte mark and represents a 50 percent increase from the previous industry maximum of 500 gigabytes.

Scotts Valley-based Seagate, the world’s largest disk-drive maker, is first releasing the product as an internal drive for PC makers. Next week, it plans to introduce external hard drives — add-ons that consumers can use to supplement their existing computer setups — with a suggested retail price of $559.


After that, Seagate plans to introduce versions for other consumer electronics, such as digital video recorders that are growing in popularity as standalone set-top-boxes or part of cable and satellite television receivers.

For consumers, the beefier drives mean they can store more movies, photos, games and songs with less worry about quickly running out of space. They also could have larger backup drives to ensure against data loss when their drives crash. (Seagate offers a five-year warranty on its drives.)

Analysts say a 750-gigabyte drive could hold roughly 375 hours of standard-definition television programming, about 75 hours of high-definition video, or more than 10,000 music CDs converted to the MP3 digital audio format.

For the hard drive industry, the capacity milestone pegs the biggest, fastest jump in its 50-year history.

The big leap stems from a new so-called “perpendicular recording” technology that allows drive makers like Seagate and rival Hitachi Global Storage Technologies to boost the density of a disk by aligning bits of data vertically rather than horizontally. At the same time, fewer moving components are needed in the drives.

The advances are leading to the largest, most reliable disk drives yet, said Seagate product marketing manager Joni Clark.

Before long, consumers will have terabyte-, or 1,000-gigabyte, drives at their disposal, Clark said.

 

[The ClayTaurus]

That'll hold a lot of donkey porn...

 

[Hobbit]

I WANT ONE!!

But not for donkey porn. I want it to store, uh, completely legally acquired music and software.

 

[no1tovote4]

Yes, I want one for my legally acquired music... Yes, legally acquired....

 

[waltky]

Using DNA to store digital data...

Study: Digital information can be stored in DNA
Jan 23,`13 -- It can store the information from a million CDs in a space no bigger than your little finger, and could keep it safe for centuries.

Is this some new electronic gadget? Nope. It's DNA. The genetic material has long held all the information needed to make plants and animals, and now some scientists are saying it could help handle the growing storage needs of today's information society. Researchers reported Wednesday that they had stored all 154 Shakespeare sonnets, a photo, a scientific paper, and a 26-second sound clip from Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech. That all fit in a barely visible bit of DNA in a test tube.

The process involved converting the ones and zeroes of digital information into the four-letter alphabet of DNA code. That code was used to create strands of synthetic DNA. Then machines "read" the DNA molecules and recovered the encoded information. That reading process took two weeks, but technological advances are driving that time down, said Ewan Birney of the European Bioinformatics Institute in Hinxton, England. He's an author of a report published online by the journal Nature. DNA could be useful for keeping huge amounts of information that must be kept for a long time but not retrieved very often, the researchers said. Storing the DNA would be relatively simple, they said: Just put it in a cold, dry and dark place and leave it alone.

The technology might work in the near term for large archives that have to be kept safe for centuries, like national historical records or huge library holdings, said study co-author Nick Goldman of the institute. Maybe in a decade it could become feasible for consumers to store information they want to have around in 50 years, like wedding photos or videos for future grandchildren, Goldman said in an email. The researchers said they have no intention of putting storage DNA into a living thing, and that it couldn't accidentally become part of the genetic machinery of a living thing because of its coding scheme.

Sriram Kosuri, a Harvard researcher who co-authored a similar report last September, said both papers show advantages of DNA for long-term storage. But because of its technical limitations, "it's not going to replace your hard drive," he said. Kosuri's co-author, Harvard DNA expert George Church, said the technology could let a person store all of Wikipedia on a fingertip, and all the world's information now stored on disk drives could fit in the palm of the hand.

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