Hitachi plans 4 TB drives in 2009
Hitachi Ltd. announced that its hard drive division is going to push way past today’s storage limits to 4 terabytes for desktop computers and 1 terabyte on laptops in 2009, with first products available in 2011. Researchers at the company created the world’s smallest disk drive heads in the 30-nanometer to 50-nanometer range, or about 2,000 times smaller than the width of an average human hair. In fact, the entire industry is reverting back to the giant magnetoresistance, or GMR hard drive head technology it used about ten years ago. The initial application of this physical effect maxed out and the industry had to replace it with tunnel magnetoresistance read heads, or TMR. “We changed the direction of the current and adjusted the materials to get good properties,” said John Best, chief technologist for Hitachi’s data-storage unit.
The company, which bought IBM’s hard drive division recently, will report at the Perpendicular Magnetic Recording Conference in Tokyo that it has made heads 30nm and 50nm wide that had signal-to-noise ratios of 30-40 dB. The technology builds on GMR (giant magnetoresistance), a physical effect that manipulates the charge and spin of electrons, allowing an increase in density and storage on hard drives. The GMR effect won two European scientists, Albert Fert and Peter Grunberg, a Nobel Prize in physics this month.GMR was discovered in 1988 and commercialized by vendors such as IBM, which used the technology to increase the capacity of its drives every year. Now that’s what I call a fine storage capacity!
Source: cnet, efluxmedia
Comments(78)
if it’s under 300E i’m buying :X:X:X
My god… I so need to have it… This is a godsend!!!
Shame Hitachi is such a crap company. They don’t honour their warranties…use any excuse to get out of them…I’ll never use them again.
This is a must have! I have to get one or two for my desktop.
All I wanna know is can I pre-order already ? =)
“Hitachi Ltd. announced that its hard drive division is going to push way past today’s storage limits to 4 terabytes for desktop computers and 1 terabyte on laptops in 2011.”
So how’s that translate into “Hitachi plans 4 TB drives in 2009″? Am I missing something?
good thing
right now i have 2×320gb, 1×120gb, 1×60gb, 1×40gb + 1×40gb external
[]D[][]v[][]D
4 terabytes !!!
I will wait for the AXXO 1 CD version
htrd: they will implement technology in 2009 and start selling in 2011
I’d rather have multiple smaller drives of around 200-300 GB capacity. Hard drive failure sucks…
Lets hope that using GMR technology (What IBM used in their deathstar range) is more stable this time and isnt gonna spawn a series of Deathstar 2 drives.
@9 madstan
AXXO doesnt release everything sadly..
he only releases movies not bloody hard disks
Bloody hell! *Packs bags and moves to Silicon Valley
looool @ #9.
aXXo = a lame group.
i personally dont like Ibm or Hitachi. but im sure other companys will follow on their footpath XD.
i could use a couple of them but hey who the hell whould be able to fill that hard drive up….
ps. btw 4TB = 4000GB to the ppl who dont already no
cheers rlslog keep up the work
damn, that will be a lot of porn
4TB = 4096GB
Yeah… tell me when they get there!
AFAIK, they suck at R&D!
But I bet Seagate will have something to say about it!
no azar, in marketing 1 GB = 1000 MB
so they plan on making bigger disks in the next 2-5 years..?
WOW! that’s unexpected.
rlslog..awaiting unrealtournament demo….. man can we have fresh news for once
whatever, i’ll buy the seagate version anyway, they’ll be cheaper and more silent.
give me 2-3 of the 4GB variant now, i want to dump my collection… yeaaaah!
i think thats to much memory what do you have on your computer a video collection/games cause im still trying to finish using my 1tb 500gigs im barely using 600gigs :the 1tb is external:
:i have only had mycomputer for 1 and a half:
@13 jgv115
he was making a joke on the people who prefer lame axxo releases over quality scene releases.
duh.
#23 should be 4TB. damn.
@#22 check newtorrents, i’ve been playing the UT demo the whole weekend…
This is such a crap press release. “In 4 years, drives will be 4 times larger!” REALLY! WHO WOULD HAVE THUNK IT! Hitachi released a 300 gig harddisk around February, 2004. 3 years later we began seeing the terabyte harddisks. Of course we’ll have 4 TB drives by 2011!
@#24 samuel: i’m collecting since the mid 90s, broadband since 2002. tv series, movies and games…
Hitachi are very good for R&D, and excellent too for breakdowns, from elevator to HD….
They have lots of clients complaining.
he he, but when the HD get damage and u loose all your long time downloaded Stuff, a Nightmare…………..
this is a joke right? why are you so hyped about? 4TB in the next 4 years? -_- thats the normal evolution of things, i bought a 500GB the past month, and there are already 1TB hard drives so how can someone be so happy about the 4GB in FOUR YEARS? instead of being so hyped about the storage capacity be happy about the reading/writing times…
btw, i still think western digital is better
if 4tb are announced lower storage drives will go down
that’s why i’m happy anyways… i don’t need 4 tb, not yet anyways. I have 200 gb right now and although it’s nearly full I keep erasing stuf i download, (i’m not gonna keep a movie forever on my HD…)
MORE PORN COLLECTIONS YAY
@7 : what if every visitor left a comment with his drives capacity ?…
And btw, this isn’t good progress. We already have drives of 2 Tb available… I think they should rather concentrate on writing speed and such stuff.
any news on the speeds? there’s no point in getting a 4 TB hdd, if it runs slower than the current drives?
they will implement technology in 2009, start selling in 2011 and recalling in 2012.
also in 2011 i believe some kind of flash hdd will play a much bigger role than the old spinning models.
wonder how long till a 1TB SSD comes out.. years?!
Awesome. awesome awesome I can’t wait. (^_^)
You can already get a 640GB SSD 800MB/sec 100,000 operations/second… 19000$ for those who are interested.. but till this price goes down to affordable (10 years) i could greatly use these onbes instead. I already have more then 4TB but 18 HDD’s raidded make ALOT of noise.
More space for porn and yeah u guesed it HD porn
How many hours of 1080p porn can you fit onto one of those? O_o
i think the chosen title is just bad.
the point of the article is not the disk size, but the change in technology.
Yes !!! Yes !!!! YYYYYEEESSSSSSS !!!!!!
HD porn here i come !!!
I already have 2 500 gig , 2 250 and 1 80 gig full of porn so this 4 TB drive is a fantastic news for me.
4 TB of porn FTW
well I think till 2011 almost every one will one do movies on 1080 res so 4 tb will become a necessity..
10 years time broadband will have speeded up and noone will get rips anymore
I agree with #42.
4 Tb drives will certainly be there before 2009, as actually the 2 Tb version exists.
Cheers to #22 iforgotsorry, about the Unreal Tourni Demo.
Very slow RLSlOG, very slow.
The unreal tournement demo has been out for about 1 week now…
Anyway, i say forget about making our curring drives bigger and make something that just doesnt fail. Something that doesnt use physical things to write and read.
#18
First you are correct but also #20 is correct.
1024GB = 1TB but to marketing 1TB = 1000GB
The other thing to remember is formatting!
On a NTFS system this can take around 7% of the HDD.
So you 4000GB or 4TB turns into 3720GB or 3.72TB (that’s 280GB)
What a shame lol
Can’t wait.
bring on the blu rays…………..
2009 or 2011? Think I’ll go with the articles date, no offense Martin
yay for slowly advancing technology.
for anyone who cares, look here:
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=2461798&CatId=8
I have two of those, all set up with 1 TB drives. So read me correctly… I have 12 TB of space. i’m not even close to using 1% right now. don’t think I ever will. but its nice to have it around to show off.
now if I could just get a nice 100Mbit connection I could be a dump or something…. hahah! here’s to dreaming!
Well, the size of HD’s go up, but so does everything else – games are getting huge, Blu-Ray and HD rips are big, and by 2011 we’ll see even bigger laser discs probably, internet speeds getting faster, so *relatively* nothing is really changing.
^^^^^^^^^^ agreed soni
There is no porn on Blu Ray
Hitachi’s new sata technology is not too bad, and the drives last quit a long time (for now that is). I built a set up for a fam member and all is going great so far. I have a specially made TB hard drive (cost 300), and three 500 gb sata SeaGates. Having a TB is a bonus when dealing with large files. I backup all my favorite shows and such and can keep going pretty much forever. I can’t wait for this.. I am sure seagate will be first though. Unless they build a worthy raptor like by then that does not blow up or sound like a freight train.
I can not see much good in HD with great ability.
I imagine one of these full of files giving problem. Imagine back up 4tb!!! Just what will spend on media blu-ray you buy another.
I thought it was sposed 2 b “Tomorrows technology today” not “slightly improved todays technology in 4 years…”
Hitachi so want to be a Sony…
Internal 500Gb x2
External 360Gb x1 500Gb x2 1Tb x1 (Soon 2)
and i only have 327Gb free…
flipz
October 15th, 2007 | 19:26
yay for slowly advancing technology.
for anyone who cares, look here:
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=2461798&CatId=8
I have two of those, all set up with 1 TB drives. So read me correctly… I have 12 TB of space. i’m not even close to using 1% right now. don’t think I ever will. but its nice to have it around to show off.
now if I could just get a nice 100Mbit connection I could be a dump or something…. hahah! here’s to dreaming!
—-
Haha, 12.000MB is what you have, 1% is 120MB – you havn’t used 120MB? Dude, you need more porn – And an OS?
ment to write 120 GB – i even got 500gb of porn on desktop.
But how many gigabytes can you fit on a 4TB hard drive?
Wow thats a lot of porn and/or mp3s.
=O
@61
Better question : How many kleenex can you use with 4TB of porn ?
In the hard drive industry 1TB=1000GB not 1024GB. So when you buy a 4TB you are in fact getting 3725GB of storage. At least that is if I calculated right.
4TB=4000GB=4000 000MB=4000 000 000KB=4000 000 000 000B
4000 000 000 000B / 1024= 3 906 250 000KB
3 906 250 000KB / 1024= 3 814 697MB
3 814 697MB / 1024= 3 725GB
3 725GB / 1024= 3,6TB
So you are really buying only 3,6TB not 4TB. I think this system is outdated and complicated. They should switch. You’re welcome to correct me if I’m wrong.
So… they should advertise that they sell 3.7TB instead of 4TB?… what if the competition doesn’t do that?
typo… 3.6
SWEET now i can lose 4TB of data all at once ! FUN ! YAY how about they come out with a 500GB 10,000RPM HD that is guaranteed to last for 5 years before they start working on this 4TB garbage.
4000 gb =
5714 dvdrips (@700mb each)
500 tv season (@8gigs each)
930 retail dvds (@4.3gigs each)
VERY possible to fill up. i fill my 300 gig hard drive ever month or two…
hitachi is a real good brand. they have the best drive diagnostic software. recommended .
I disagree Mr. X. Hitachi are notorious for wiping their hands of warranty claims (at least in Asia Pacific). You get bounced to a remote call centre and then they refuse to honour warranty…I direct all clients to other brands now as a result of the poor treatment I got from them (about 15 months ago)
ummm…i dont think that this “monstrosity” of hard drive space will be out on 2009…i say 2TB verison in Mid 2008 and most possible 4 TB at late 2008 – jan-feb 2009…
i always listen to mixed opinions about the hitachi HDDs…some say that these are good, and some say that these suck…i say, if u didnt take any of your HDDs out of the case..then they will be fine…and about HDD failures, its a commercial thing, so you can buy more and more HDDs…painful as it is, but its the wheel of industry and the poor consumers…its a pain really to loose 4TB worth of data…(at least 30% of them are pr0n lol
)
remember: GEEKS HAVE BIG DISKS! LOL XD
“with first products available in 2011″
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/10/15/0216253
yay for stealing others content
[16:57] [Slashdot] Hitachi Promises 4-TB Hard Drives By 2011
[21:17] [rlslog] Hitachi plans 4 TB drives in 2009
real timestamps. lol.
People actually keep the stuff they’ve downloaded after they’ve watched it? I always delete my stuff bc I know I’ll never watch it again.
more hard drive space woo hoo
one day ill get me one of them
biiiiig game collection (bought and torrent)
id love to install them all so i could just play whatever i liked without the pain of finding disk space and install and all that fun stuff
off topic….just i thought
porn…hmmmm where to begin
dont get me wrong i like girls and sex ALOT! ok
but porn is dirty IMO and it demeans both men and women to the point that they become like unthinking animals in regards to sex
i will say that maybe in a marriage a porno or two aint so bad for two people to share to “spice up” their sex life so to speak
but honestly
if there wasnt so much porn in society there wouldnt be so many sex crimes ….well thats what i reckon
think of your sisters and mothers and aunts
would you like to see them in porn? no? well im sure their families feel the same dont you think?
so anyway this is just the way i feel and im sure many of you will dissaggree and some of you will write smart ass comments in return but IMO it needs to be said
peace
In related news Microsoft announced that system requirements for vista sp2 will require 3.7 Tb to run….And are looking to acquire Hitachi Ltd…Just a joke…
Imagine 5 4tb drives in a raid array….now, that’s hot.
Beats the hell out of my 5 by 500 sata array…as long as the access time is decent. Get 2 4tb and mirror them, your pron is safe…The cost will be prohibitive for the average user for the first 2 years anyway. These drive will turn up in fortune 500 fileservers long before we can afford them for personal use.
Ouch, gonna suck when that bad boy quits with 4TB of un-backed up data, hahaha