Seagate R&D Announces 50 Terabit Breakthrough

[Jason Dunn]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=14895' target='_blank'>http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=14895</a><br /><br /></div>"Hard drive giant Seagate is set to present research findings this week which mean storage capacities of 50 terabits a square inch are within the grasp of technologists. It will present its findings on March 25th at the American Physical Society conference based on R&D using heat assisted magnetic recording (HAMR). That technique means that over 3.5 million high res photographs, 2,800 audio CDs, 1600 hours of TV programmes or the entire printed collection of the US Library of Congress can sit on 30 millimetres disks. Seagate is confident that its R&D team will be able to deliver such ultra high storage densities."<br /><br />Damn. Just when you thought that hard drives couldn't get any bigger. 8O I see two potential uses for this technology in my own life: being able to store much more video on my computer, and being able to back up redundant sets of data. If you had essentially unlimited storage, what would you do with it?

[RenesisX]

In your own lifetime?

Local storage will become essentially non-existant as bandwidth becomes more plentiful.

Why should 1,000,000 people hold a copy of a song on their hard drives when the on-line music store can hold 1 copy and stream it to you wherever you are on the planet?

> Chaz &lt;

[Jason Dunn]

Local storage will become essentially non-existant as bandwidth becomes more plentiful.

Hmm...interesting. I believe that will eventually happen, but not for a long, long time. If the patchy North American cellular networks have shown us anything, it's that bandwidth and coverage are not as plentiful as TV ads would have us believe?

Why should 1,000,000 people hold a copy of a song on their hard drives when the on-line music store can hold 1 copy and stream it to you wherever you are on the planet?

Sure, but what if that store goes offline? I don't think the level of trust is there yet - I know that I want to OWN and STORE my own data/content, not leave it up to someone else to manage.

[Suhit Gupta]

But this article fails to speculate on how long it will take for such tech to make it out on the market, for consumers that is. I went to Seagate's site as well as Terry McDaniel's but there is no mention of it there either. I guess we have to wait for the paper to be published before getting an idea.

Suhit

[Jonathon Watkins]

Why should 1,000,000 people hold a copy of a song on their hard drives when the on-line music store can hold 1 copy and stream it to you wherever you are on the planet?

Sure, but what if that store goes offline? I don't think the level of trust is there yet - I know that I want to OWN and STORE my own data/content, not leave it up to someone else to manage.

Totally agree with Jason. I want the security of knowing that I have the music/data locally. Cable outages happen often enough, and Sod's law says it will be at the worst possible time. :?

Besides, monster large HDs are really cheap! :way to go:

Welcome to DMT RenesisX! 8)

[RenesisX]

Hey guys - thanks for the welcome :)

Another thing that will disappear is ownership of digital media (music, movies, TV shows). Ownership of digital media just gives us something in a nice box to put on the shelf so our friends can come round and be jealous of our 200 DVD collection.

There won't be any point in owning music or movies in the future.

An album gets listened to on average only 1.5 times after purchase. I would bet the statistic is the same for DVDs, maybe less.

Would you rather pay €0.01 to stream a track once (€0.10 to stream an album), or €15.00 to own it?

Sure, the music store might go off-line for 10 minutes, but then reliability will improve as the companies become more experienced - and your music isn't critical - you could live without it for 10 minutes :)

> Chaz &lt;

[Philip Colmer]

An album gets listened to on average only 1.5 times after purchase. I would bet the statistic is the same for DVDs, maybe less.

Not in my house, I'm afraid. I listen to my albums a lot, particularly the ones I have in my car.

DVDs get watched at least three times on average with my family.

I'm willing to believe that I might be exceptional though :)

--Philip

[Jason Dunn]

Another thing that will disappear is ownership of digital media (music, movies, TV shows). Ownership of digital media just gives us something in a nice box to put on the shelf so our friends can come round and be jealous of our 200 DVD collection.

I think you're right, although I believe it will take several generations for this change to occur. After all, I'm 29 and I've seen the entire spectrum of analog to digital to ripping - and I still want to own my music. I think the transaction cost would have to get very, very low for people to move to a completely rented paradigm. When I get a new album, I'll typically listen to it for an entire day while I'm working - and if I thought for a second that I'd be paying more with the rental model, I'd still want to buy it outright. The "pay for play" scenario would have to be ultra cheap - perhaps 5 cents per play - in order for it to succeed. And even then, the mentality of "As I listen to this music, it's costing me money" is a very difficult one to overcome. Who wants the stress of feeling like you're on a long distance call? ;-)

Great discussion!

[Jonathon Watkins]

Hey guys - thanks for the welcome :)

No probs Chaz - I'll wave as I drive past you each day.

An album gets listened to on average only 1.5 times after purchase. I would bet the statistic is the same for DVDs, maybe less.

Where did you get that statistic from? It really sounds on the low side to me. I have been known to listed to a popularity good album a 10 times in a row - in a day (while doing other stuff).

I own 450 odd CDs and have not touched most of them for over a year or two since ripping them. However, they get played each day via MP3 on the computer. I agree with Jason in terms of pay per play. People physiologically like to know what something is going to cost. That is why fixed price deals are so popular. E.g. with phone tariffs (UK anyway) it is sometimes cheaper to go with pay-as-you-go, but people like fixed price contracts so they have certainly of the cost, even if it costs them more.

So, I really doubt that renting music will catch on. It jusst does not feel right. :?

[RenesisX]

Yes, it will take a fair while for everything to change over completely - people already have a huge investment in their existing CD and DVD collections, for instance.

In the music sector, the pay-per-play model is already available, and at a decent price - I'm thinking about the on-line sites in Europe (mostly powered by OD2) - these provide a per track stream price of about 1.5c - about 15 cents for the whole album, if you actually like all the tracks from the album (you could just stream the ones you like and save even more money). (Rhapsody in the US also offers an excellent subscription service which is completely streamed).

It's not without problems - the media aggregators don't like it as the profit is less on a stream than a download, and their overall revenue is obviously a lot less if people download rather than stream. Plus, right now ownership ties you to one provider - if you lose your DRM license for instance, you need to head back to your provider to get another one (if they let you - otherwise your purchase is totally lost).

> Chaz &lt;