http://www.theage.com.au/news/breaking/seagate-to-roll-out-monster-hard-drives/2006/04/26/1145861402298.html

heres the link to the public release...

to be honest, i think anything over 500gb is too risky.. even 500gb is alot IMO

the reason that is is simply due to the amount of actual movement of teh head required to access files from it.. i see it working harder and causing excessive heating issues. I mean i dont think its a bad idea, but for video, one must take into account that the equipemnt WILL eventually wear out from wear and tear.. and in this case, if u have 740gb of video footage on the one drive, rcovering any lost data will take weeks, not days..

Like i said, one of these drives would be great to have, BUT on teh outset, the risks in larger capacity drives are far too risky... simply for the data recovery process if nto for teh heating overworking issues..

As an example, i have an 20gb WD drive which is partitions into 3 sections. This is my system drive.. 30gb fr OS the rest is jsut crap.. then i have 7 250GB HDD ot including Externals. If one of these drives fail, i can easily recover data and footage... but the storage and power id be saving still doesnt warrant the loss of 750gb of data...
I dunno if it makes any sense, but this is another reason why i dont run Raids. up to 500gb.. maybe.. a big maybe.. leaning towards yes.. but any higher.. then i wouldnt want to risk it..

I can never have enough disc space. 750 gig? Bring it on!

John

The way everyone is saying that all drives have the inevitable catastrophe of failure really highlights something this big drive could be good for: making backups. Put it inside an external enclosure with an eSata link (far faster than FW or USB). Now you can backup some "work in progress" projects so that failures on your other drives WON'T be such a catastrophe.

And if all you're using this monster drive for is backups, it won't crater anytime soon.

I'm not sure whether there is any more risk to this new jump in size than there was going from, say 100 MB to 500 MB. There might be, but to know for sure, you'd really have to look at the actual implementation to see if they are stressing some component more than they have in the past. Bigger does not automatically mean "less reliable." In fact, so far, on this amazing disk storage march to 1 TB, it has been amazing how reliability has been maintained.

its not the actual drive which im refering to, but with that capacity, youd obviously have MORE data on this than a smaller 250gb drive.. now if you lose the 750, u lose the the 750.. but if u lose 250, you only lose 250.. now to me, 250gb would be much easier to handle in this scenario than a 750 ever would..

as for it being used asa backup i totlaly agree...

dnt get me wrong, i have nothign against the unit, im just concerned for data loss.. and to me, tryng to recover 750gb is alot to consider... compared to trying to recover 250...

now if you lose the 750, u lose the the 750.. but if u lose 250, you only lose 250..

True, but that argument applies to ANY increase in storage capacity, doesn't it? Is there something unusual or different about the increase to 750 that is different from when we went from 80 GB drives to 250 GB drives, roughly the same 3:1 ratio?

I remember the first time i lost the contents of a 40MB drive (that's 0.00004TB !!!!) and it was heart-wrenching. There's no acceptable size of data loss.

I would be willing to bet though that each new generation of drives is better designed and more reliable than the previous models.

Plus, files are getting larger with HD... so a 750GB drive might hold the same amount (hrs:mins:sec) of HD files as a 250GB drive filled with SD files.... say 5 hours of footage on either drive.

Just stay away from LACIE!

Memory cards folks, memory cards.....

That's the future. No more moving parts and no more heat. Just shove a 500 gig flash ( or whatever ) card into your reader and you're off.

"Oh they'll never be able to make memory cards THAT big........."

.....uh-huh.

Just stay away from LACIE!

Why? I know a number of FCP users who swear by them, not at them.
They get trotted all around from edit suite to edit suite.
One friend even packs one in a road case for field shoots.
No complaints yet and it's been over 3 years.

Mike

Put three of them together in a RAID 3 configuration and you've got a 1.5TB storage solution with performance and redundancy. (You can swap a failed drive with no data loss).

NetCell makes a RAID 3 controller chip & card for this (made by PNY) that you can buy at NewEgg.com for about $130. Reviews say that RAID 3 is best for long file read/writes (i.e. video editing). Currently the controller card is limited to the speed of PCI (which is still faster than USB of FW), but they'll likely have a PCI Express solution someday...

Not sure what this drive will cost, but 3 of them plus a $130 RAID controller card is probably a whole lot cheaper than any 1.5TB solution you'll find elsewhere.

I remember upgrading to a 1 gig drive and a couple of my friends telling me "You'll never need that much". Those were the days.

- Ray

www.undergroundplanet.com

I recall my first computer with only 40 MB... that was awesome. I am a big fan of Seagate drives and am excited to see them lead the way into the new sizes. We should see 1 TB drives by the end of the year.

As far as a drive crashing... its just bad when any drive does.

Holographic dics... are pretty interesting. 1 disc = 300 GB. I don't know if they will or can but it would be interesting to see a holographic hard drive.

Chad

When you're working with HDV a terabyte isn't a lot of storage. Disk access has to be efficient (ie quick) for real time display and that makes firewire connection HDs inadequate. A very large single disk might suffer excessive access times unless defragged fairly often. However I'd have no problems with 1TB ext HD for storage and backup, although the alternative of backing up to smaller HDs in caddies appeals more to me. One project - one HD.
As far as data recovery from failed disks goes, the time taken is probably influenced more by the nature of the failure than by the size of the disk. I recovered 300GB from a failed Maxtor in about 3 hours.

Disk access has to be efficient (ie quick) for real time display and that makes firewire connection HDs inadequate.

eSATA is a good solution. It's same as internal SATA, with extra shielding on the cable and a connector to support it. New motherboards are supporting eSATA, but you can also use an older motherboard with inexpensive add-on cards.

So, one fast and (relatively) inexpensive large storage solution is:
1) add a RAID 3 card to your PC (supports 3 or 5 drives), cost $110 - $150
2) put SATA drives in an external enclosure

RAID is optional, of course. Using an external enclosure takes the drives' heat out of your PC. Good enclosures have a fan. (NewEgg has single drive enclosures and multi-drive enclosures can be found, for example, at
http://www.pc-pitstop.com/sata_enclosures/ )

>>I remember upgrading to a 1 gig drive..."You'll never need that much".

Oh yeah. Me too. I thought I would NEVER fill a 1 GB drive.

I *just* added (formatting now) a 10th drive to my tower...a Seagate 400 GB ($159) at Best Buy.

I think my original 1 GB drive was about $300.

I have had very good luck with Maxtor drives, but with 400 GB for $159...I'll certainly give Seagate a go.

I remember the first time I saw a computer with the then unheard of 2 GB hard drive. It was a Packard Bell at Incredible Universe (one of the many failed Tandy ventures). I believe the system cost $3000. This was prior to computer editing, and I remember thinking "You would never be able to fill up that drive!".

I *just* added (formatting now) a 10th drive to my tower...a Seagate 400 GB ($159) at Best Buy.

...looking forward to Black Friday when these babies will go for $99...