Terabyte drive to debut later this year

[Lazybones]

http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9584_22-6105515.html

Desktop hard drives holding 1 terabyte, or 1,000 gigabytes, of storage will likely debut in 2006, according to Bill Healy, senior vice president of product strategy and marketing at Hitachi Global Storage Technologies. These drives, which will have a 3.5-inch diameter, are expected to be incorporated into PCs and home servers.

Hmm, to wait or not to wait..... More price drops in the near future, sound good to me.

[Mr. Analog]

Sell those old 20GB drives now while you can still get $$ for them!

[Darren Dirt]

(8:00pm)
>FORMAT C:\

(midnight checkup on the progress)
11% completed...

[Mr. Analog]

How heavy are those suckers gonna be?

[Lazybones]

(8:00pm)
>FORMAT C:\

(midnight checkup on the progress)
11% completed...

That is why there is a /Q quick option.. doesn't destroy data but does clear the file references.

How heavy are those suckers gonna be?

Should be the about the same as current drives.. but much less than the equivalent number of current drives required for the same capacity.

[Tom]

XFS formats in mere seconds, regardless of the volume size And damn, if you store tons of large files, it saves a boat load of space. in a 100+GB part, you easily save GBs in metadata. Not to mention that it supports all sorts of other nice features like 16TB (on 32bit linux) filesystem sizes, optimization for RAID usage, asynchronous journal, concurrent access to different parts of the fs at the same time from different threads (hardware or not). Its really quite nice for data storage. it's "scandisk"/"fsck" program is an empty "main" function every mount the journal is replayed, so no scan is ever needed (which saves quite a bit of time on larger volumes).

[Shayne]

I can destroy the FAT in seconds as well and I would say thats hardly formatting.

[Tom]

Yet the XFS filesystem is fully useable afterwards

[Lazybones]

What I was saying is that with the /Q NTFS is ready in seconds.

[Tom]

Even on a few hundred GB to TBs? I recall a quick format on a 60GB part taking longer than nessesary.

[Lazybones]

Depends on the speed of the hard drive... I seem to recall you owning lots of crappy ones over the years.

[Shayne]

Destroying the FAT table is like what Lazy said a quick format.  I did 2 320GB drives in less then 30 seconds each with a quick format.  However a normal format took HOURS!

[Tom]

I seem to recall you owning lots of crappy ones over the years.

Too true. this was on a new 80GB drive. Quite speedy.

Destroying the FAT table is like what Lazy said a quick format.

only FAT has a FAT table Most filesystems use blockgroups and bitmaps.

I couldn't imagine formatting anything greater than a 40GB drive with FAT. It wasn't even meant for anything larger than a few hundred MB.

Now on my last format of two raid0ed 47GB or so sized partitions (yes, I know, not the best idea, but its still faster overall than just two apended parts) took all of 5 seconds. A full format of XFS. Its a REALLY nice filesystem.

[Lazybones]

Unless you know what the format is doing it is sort of a mote argument.. I formated a 40 GB drive with the quick option in about 5 s or less as well today.

Really the full format option for NTFS or FAT are just there to do a check on the drive and do a minimal overwrite of date (not secure). If you want to really erase a drive AND USE IT AGAIN you need to use something like Boot and Nuke to write random data in several passes to prevent raw data mining at a later date.

[Tom]

I know exactly what a ext2/3 mkfs does not so much about a XFS mkfs, I _think_ it might not actually write all of the blockgroups till it needs them, otherwise, I'm not totally certain how its so much faster than the mkfs.ext[23] operation.

As "super geeky" as it seems, I've been working on a filesystem, I spend a good deal time studying ext2. And have looked at Reiser and XFS a little.