Future Techno-layman Terminology

[dm-horus]

... If this becomes the norm for electronics shelves, I think so...

[Leviathan]

Well if we make a major break thru in a new way of storeing data.

[omagaalpha]

I say yes because like teraflop & terabytes think cool have hardrive hold a terabyes infomations hehehehe

[Mez]

Current top "consumer HDD" is a 500GB SATA drive,

with the advent of SATA2 and SATA3 (if you dont know SATA1 has a transfer speed of 150mbs, 2 of 300 and 3 will have 450mbs, so it is feasible in terms of access speds to get 1 tb drives)

As the densities of the disk get bigger so will storage. i expect HDD'S to be 1tb standard in about 5 years. seeing as 160-200GB is standard now and the advent of Video/TV over the internet is possible/being trialed then the demand for larger and larger HDD's will happen.
 

[lordly_dragon]

i said no because it will take a long time and i dont know what is a terraflop and i generally know computer part and terminology very well

[dm-horus]

lol way to be honest, dragon.

the total size of the internet is measured in terabytes, if that helps you get a grasp of how big the numbers are that we are talking about.

[lordly_dragon]

for the byte part i understand it tera is like kilo its a numerical factor

but for the flop part what the hell is this exept the tree first card in poker...

[dm-horus]

i think a flop is a couple orders of magnitude above hertz or something similar. it reflects the rate of throughput in a device and usually refernces a hardware bus in what ive read. supercomputers and cpu farms measure their total processing power in flops. a tera is above giga but im not sure by how much. since im too lazy to google, ill guess that a terabyte is one hundred thousand gigabytes. if i get around to it ill post a link to a chart.


Update:


Multiples of bytes
Decimal prefixes
(SI)    Binary prefixes
(IEC 60027-2)
Name    Symbol    Multiple    Name    Symbol    Multiple
kilobyte    kB    103    kibibyte    KiB    210
megabyte    MB    106    mebibyte    MiB    220
gigabyte    GB    109    gibibyte    GiB    230
terabyte    TB    1012    tebibyte    TiB    240
petabyte    PB    1015    pebibyte    PiB    250
exabyte    EB    1018    exbibyte    EiB    260
zettabyte    ZB    1021    zebibyte    ZiB    270
yottabyte    YB    1024    yobibyte    YiB    280

And go here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teraflop

[Hooman]

Yes, I was just gonna add that a terabyte is about 1000 (or 1024, depending on who you ask) gigabytes.

A flop is short for floating point operations. So if something can do 1 gigaflop, it can perfom 1 billion floating point operations per second. A useful measure for say a rendering farm. Doesn't really mean much if you're not doing floating point math though.
 

[Oprime]

Here's how it is my buddies

Bit    = 1 or 0
Byte = 8 bits
Kilo  = 1000 byte
Mega = 1000 kilo
Giga = 1000 mega
Tera = 1000 giga
Exo  = 1000 tera
Peta = 1000 exo

btw IBM is working on a Petaflop super computer. The IBM grid which is going to be a combination of every CELL processor based computer on the planet might be 1 Petaflop or higher once more devices start using this technology. And they do go up to the next level every 1000 of each unit. Anything other then Digital storage media stores it as 1024 because of the way it has to be stored when analog (aka Hard drives or other magnetic media)
 

[Hooman]

Heh. I didn't really notice those numbers in dm-horus's last post. Those are a bit odd.

But yeah, they go up by 1000 or 1024. I've sorta suspected harddrives were measure using 1000s instead of 1024s to make them look bigger and sell more. They never seem to have the stated capacity. But then, that could just be space taken up with formatting info. Computer memory certainly goes by 1024 though. That's just a plain addressing issue. It'd probably be harder to make memory that wasn't a power of 2.
 

[zigzagjoe]

yeah hooman, they are measured in 1000 but are 1024 actually. i bet it is for the same reason as the memory. or just mfger greed.

but what i really dont get is the sata 'craze'. ffs ppls, no drive can saturate ata-100 [100mbs bandwith], so what is the point with sata2 and such? hell, the only advantage i can see with using sata is the smaller cables, compared to pata. so unless you have raid or such, you will not see any great leaps in access speed mez. last thing i knew the more typical speed was ~66mb/sec and ~80mb/sec tops. if you have the same mechanism, it will not be much faster, if any.
 

[Oprime]

What really makes a difference with HD speed is how the drive addresses each sector/cluster, number of RPMs, the bus the hard drive uses, and the speed the arm can get information. SATA drives are much faster then IDE drives. SATA devices that use NCQ can out perform IDE or SCSI drives that are 10,000rpm or faster at only 7,200rpm.

SATA is hot swappable. There is no need to restart or having to buy extremely expensive controller cards for servers. Because of this if a SATA drive in a Raid system dies all a person has to do is unplug the drive, plug the new drive and the controller will start rebuilding the newly added drive without having to take down the server. SATA has no where near as many error correction systems built into the drives or controllers. SATA doesn't share a bus with other SATA devices thus allowing the drive to use the Bus to its full potential.

SATA vs. IDE/SCSI is like comparing Frame Relay to dialup modems or Hyper transport to the Intel FSB. The real point for sata… is that it allows people to have affable high performance hard drives and nothing more. And yes I have a SATA drive and I love my 15sec windows load time :heh: .

[Stormy]

SATA vs. IDE/SCSI is like comparing Frame Relay to dialup modems or Hyper transport to the Intel FSB. The real point for sata… is that it allows people to have affable high performance hard drives and nothing more. And yes I have a SATA drive and I love my 15sec windows load time :heh: .

15 seconds!?!?!? It takes me like.... 2 min to boot up


I think eventually it will get there

Dang, I'd love to have a fancy render farm like that Hooman