I'm looking forward to a non-Seagate choice for drives over 1TB. I usually don't have any complaints about Seagate, but their recent firmware bricking issues is cause for concern.

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I wish this drive had been out when I started building my Windows Home Server. I'd love to have a landing pad that big and a 1T secondary drive.

I think storage is going to explode in the near future with all of the ways to collect digital video and pics, and now you can view them through your TV with TiVo, Xbox, PS3, etc.

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Well, 2TB drive is big enough to store 3 hours of uncompressed HD movie signal (1920x1080 x 8bpc x 25fps) audio included. I doubt we would see breaching 2.5TB in a near future. Not with current technology.

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I agree storage capacity is becoming a big deal, regardless of performance. With the inevitable rise of BD, storage space will be critical. I'd like to see systems equipped with primary 500GB SSDs and secondary storage capacity via 2TB plus storage drives. There is no need for blazing fast storage for digital media. ie... MP3, XVID, MP4 AVC etc... With larger storage available at reasonable prices there is no reason to not encode music in Lossless formats. To encode XVID, etc with higher bitrates and 480P, 720P, 1080P. With Quadcores priced to sell and stream processing a reality, high bit rate, high res video should be come the standard. Throw in the fact that nice 22" and 24" LCDs are a great value. Now if we can only get reasonable prices on super fast internet connections... Or perhaps if Verizon speeds up the deployment of FIOS.

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I still enjoy Xvid codecs only because that's the best my Xbox 360 will play, unless I shoot for the less popular WMV-HD codec.

Maybe one day the 360's Media Center will support more robust codecs. Maybe.

That being said, I don't think storage is necessarily the limiting factor in the usage of poor video codecs, but rather the bandwidth issue you mention at the end.

It's much easier to retrieve a 700mb file than a 8-25gb one. Though I still prefer to grab a file in WMV-HD if it's available.

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Microsoft doesn't do open source period, unless they are forced too which I hope will be the case. I mean XViD and FFDShow codecs are so common that I can't imagine getting along with out them. God forbid Microsoft adapt early on for once.

They would rather spend millions upon millions of dollars to develop some inferior technology than admit the majority of the products they make are simply overpriced bloatware.

I'm a Windows user but man sometimes I just hate MS.

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The 360 supports h264 in a MP4 container though there are some limitations. If you're encoding the files yourself, it shouldn't be a problem.

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God, MP4 is such a crappy format it's not even funny. When I tried converting some video files into MP4 format so I could play it on my phone do you even know how many different MP4 choices I had? There were at least 12 different MP4 choices I had, and only 1 works for my phone. If it's for your computer though all the formats should work, but for portable devices it's a biatch. If a device says it supports XVID or DIVX then it supports ALL versions of them, not just one or two. I think that's why people use them so much. WMV is also a horrible format, but for vastly different reasons.

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MP4 is a container, like avi and mkv. DivX and XviD are codecs, like h.264. People use DivX and XviD because they've been around for a decade now. They're stable, and XviD is free. But h.264 is superior in pretty much every way. Most people don't even realize just how efficient it is until they forget what they learned from using the older stuff. It needs a bitrate only about half the other two need to produce the same quality image.

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Yea, but the problem with it is the containers that it can be put in. I'm pretty sure you can't put it into an AVI container and that pretty much kills compatibility. And MP4 has it's problems as well. MKV/OGM are quite limited too.

BTW, I never use a constant bitrate anyways, it's not very efficient. But I haven't messed with h.264 since it only plays on my computer.... in which case I don't need to convert it anyways.

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Sorry, but you have no idea what you're talking about, especially since you stated a format is crappy because it is flexible.

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You can put any number of streams of video codec with any audio codec with any subtitle file in MKV... how is that limited?

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The Landing-Pad issue got resolved with an update around december, i think. It shouldn't matter anymore. It got fixed around 3 days after i installed the 1.5tb as systemdisk (for having a big landing pad.. :)).

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"Of course, the first question that comes to mind is spindle speeds"

Nope, the first thing that comes to mind is "how much".

:) unless of course the sentence was meant to be tied to the previous paragraph, rather than starting its own.

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more importantly though, i was just about to get a 1.5tb, but have been hesitant with all the issues that the seagate unit has been having. hope the new wd 1.5 will at least spark a further price cut now that there's competition.

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I haven't had any issues with my 1.5TB Seagate drive. Didn't they release a fix for the broken fixed firmware?

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Yup, me neither. Maybe mine have the updated firmware. Also, it's not the capacity of the hard drives but their speed is the biggest issue for me. Capacity grows faster than speed. We really need faster storage, not bigger.

Z.

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It wont be long before you have both. By 2011 I can see a 3.5" HDD coming with a 450MB/s 128GB SSD and a single platter 1TB HDD. You'll only have 1 SATA 3.0 cable hooked up because the port multiplier and other connections are inside the HD. Your system gets installed on the SSD and your "media" goes on the spindle drive.

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I agree. I prefer less a noisy and lower power consumption/temperature HDD..

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I'd rather have a 1TB drive with just two platters. Are they gonna make any of those?

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Yes, the WD10EADS will transition to a two platter design as a cost saving measure.

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Any source for that information, or as to when it will happen?
Presumably the model number will change to reflect this change or it will be damn confusing?

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Probably will just be damn confusing.

WD didn't change model numbers last time they transitioned drives to models with higher density platters.

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You can bet it will be confusing. Just like there exist 3 platter and 4 platter 1GB EACS now, there will almost certainly be 2 and 3 platter 1GB EADS (and possibly 2 platter EACS too making that 3 different drives with quite different performance/power/noise with the exact same model number except the batch number is different - remember the C vs D there is only for 16 vs 32 MB cache). As much as I like WD disks, I really think they shouldn't do this. Worse, there's no obvious transition date to new models since WD appears to produce two different versions at the same time.

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Is anyone else a little irritated that advances in spindle rate and general performance of HDDs have been virtually halted for years, while capacity has increased at a healthy rate?

Don't get me wrong, I love capacity. I am using about 2TB of data across multiple RAID arrays and over a dozen hard drives right now. I have nothing against big drives. But capacity is cheap. Even capacity with redundancy is affordable. Performance is not.

To get substantially improved performance in all areas, right now one must use multiple drives in RAID 0, 0+1, or 10 or use pricey enterprise-class drives. A 10,000 RPM drive is pretty nice, but they're still extremely expensive and frankly the performance improvement isn't good enough. RAID 0 is a crappy option because it increases the chance of data loss, and RAID 0+1/10 brings costs much higher.

It's appalling that speeds and capacities in other areas (RAM, CPU, GPU) are doubling every 1 to 2 years, but over the last five years or so HDDs have maybe increased 50% overall, with virtually no increase in seek time. An 80GB 7200RPM was the standard back then, and the same amount of money now probably gets you a 7200RPM 500GB that performs 30-40% better overall but nearly identically on seek times.

Most will agree the overall computer experience these days is slowed by the hard drive more than anything. We're basically using bigger versions of the same drives we had just past the turn of the millennium, but RAM, CPU, and GPU are anywhere from 500% to 2000% faster. That's ridiculous. Instead of buying multiple GPUs or 8GBs of RAM, I build a high-end systems with 4 or 8 hard drives in RAID 0+1. I, for one, think that's ridiculous, but the overall experience is better than giving someone 2TB of storage or triple SLI.

Is there a good technological reason they can't make 10,000 RPM or 15,000 RPM drives mainstream? These drives have always been cost-prohibitive for the consumer or forced an unacceptable sacrifice in storage capacity. Where are the affordable 500GB 10,000 RPM drives? That's what we need, not 2TB 5,400 RPM nonsense.

/rant

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I think that you're looking at the limitations of the current technology of a spinning metal disk. You can't read the data accurately enough at higher spindle speeds.

Ultimately what's important is the rate at which the read head can read data off the platter.

Note that the 15k RPM drives are really only 2.5" sized, but put inside a 3.5".

I think that the only way to boost speeds is going to be with heavy usage of flash memory.

We're not really able to manufacture the drives to within tighter tolerances (physically constructing the platters and read mechanism, that is) than we could when the 15k RPM drives came out. That, I think, is what's really limiting the drive market.

Notice that for everything else that's doubling in speed, NONE of them have any moving parts in them? I think that's the problem. Get rid of the moving parts, and you'll see a speed increase with drives.

Ultimately, it all boils down to the mighty manufacturing tolerances of a device spinning very fast is harder to achieve than the latest die process tech Intel/AMD is using. Improving the areal density is about the only way to boost the actual read speed of current tech, I think.

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There is a market for large, slow drives. (I'm in the market for one, I just wish they were cheaper) Disk to disk backup for instance... archiving... bulk media storage.

Sure, speed is good, but I also like big slow and preferably cheap drives for things that require space, not speed.

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OK, might be stretching a bit here, but I was trying to figure out what was required to make these drives work, and I've miscalculated something. If we take 400Gb/in^2 to mean 400,000,000,000, and run the calculation 1/sqrt(400,000,000,000 Gb/in^2) to get the linear density in one dimension, I come up with approximately 1.5 micro-inches between bits, or right about 40nm. What am I missing here?

I ran some more calculations quickly, and it seems that 10 square inches (500GB/400Gb/in^2) is about right per platter. I just can't quite grok a positional accuracy on that scale.

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So how long before motherboards support EFI so we can boot from drives using GPT rather than MBR? I see a problem coming as we pass the 2TB barrier..

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