BAD HARDWARE WEEK

5 plates, 7200 rpm, 1000 GBs of storage, 8,5 msec read access time, 9,2 msecs to write, transfer rate is 1,070Mbits/s.
Hitachi's HDS721010KLA330 (picture above) is the first 1 TB hard disk drive ever, just announced in Japan. Missed Jim Gray, great man and world's class expert in huge databases and disks, predicted that in his talk, even in year 2001. Well, that wasn't too hard, taking in account all those previously known HD trends. Though he thought it will happen by the end of 2006, it happened only 3 months later, and that failure in 6 years time span is damned good result (in 4% error tollerance range ). The only strange thing about it is that 1TB disk in 2001 was quite unnecessary and strange idea.

I remember well, my new PC (year 2000 patched) was equipped
that year with "huge" WD 8GB disk. However, Jim correctly envisioned the time when 1TB disk will lead the race. And one more important thing. It will essentially be a TAPE. In performance sense, of course. Of course, I immediately recognized the result of that his finding , and connected it with my own research on ongoing trends in computer future memory hierarchy with the following moto: Tape is dead, disk will become tape, Flash will become HD, RAM will become place for smaller file system objects, and large L3 - L4 SRAM caches will takeover former RAM duties. In 2002. That is why it was pretty brave claim.

4 years later, in December 2006 Jim wrote his last article before he passed his way by the end of January. Here is an disk related important quote form that article:

So, what is the next in Jim's last article? In December 2006, Microsoft was more than a year involved in active research of flash file systems. Their latest findings to be announced this month (from my talks with Jim Gray) stresses the necessity of standardisation of flash file system hardware and data structures necessary for its so much needed acceptable operating conditions performance. More details will follow from me soon. Like Internet Operating system will take over my PC? Why? Because I needed Windows when my hd was size of 8GB. I thought I will never need anyone bigger. Now 8GB is the size of my web wisw storage size. Now only Web 2.0 to make mature enough to use that free web storage. Let me remind you, Yahoo just made its storage infinite , a few days ago. ! ! I hope I will survive to see it by my bare eyes. Sadly, Jim Gray never saw his own 1TB prediction became literally true, though I inform him even in 2006 that Hitachi has this model at picture above ready for production, as soon as possible.