Awesome less boxes!

Finally - a 1 TeraByte hard drive!
Seagate released a 1TB HDD a few days ago, not long after Hitachi released its 1TB model. The RRP so far is around AUD$450 (US$399) so its not at all over priced. In fact its almost in line with current HD prices. I mean AUD$0.45/GB isn't a bad price at all. I mean if this trend actually went into the current hard drive market, we would only be paying $36 for an 80GB HD.

So, for those of you curious as to why the 1TB drive is a feat worth mentioning, and why there have been sudden jumps from the classic 80/120/160/250GB drives to 1TB (500GB wasn't all that popular - like the Hitachi Mammoth drive).

Up until recently hard drive technology was slowing down in the rate at which it could increase data density on the hard drive platters. Essentially about to contradict Moore's Law if this had in fact happened.

Since a few years ago, some very clever people came up with the concept of perpendicular recording of data bits. This meant that data density went up by a fairly decent amount.

Ok, I can imagine some of you are looking puzzled right now. Allow me to elaborate:

The current popular storage method is longitudinal recording, the new and improved method, perpendicular recording, puts the data bits on the platter a different way, essentially we can represent it like this:

(image courtesy of wikipedia)


So you see, this means that on the same amount of real estate (being the HD platter) we can now fit a lot more data bits. This allows for larger drives, more storage, less paper in boxes. In fact - one of these 1TB drives could hold enough documents that would approximately 50,000 trees worth of paper. Now all we need to do is stop printing every useless email, or tell your bank to send you online statements rather than mailing them to you. This way we can all save a few trees (or a whole forest if you feel like filling your new HD up with a few hundred gigabytes worth of books). OK I'll stop sounding like a tree hugger now!

On the surface...

Recently I came across one of Microsoft's new gadgets. It is being touted as a great new piece of hardware that has a large variety of consumer and commercial applications.

I'm talking of course about Microsoft Surface. Have a gander at the website, the videos are quite impressive.

Though after I stopped being excited a few minutes after watching the somewhat information-less videos, I started to wonder about the feasibility of Microsoft Surface.

From a commercial perspective, I can see the enormous benefits of the device, as it will allow many things like paying bills, splitting bills, ordering food and drinks to go a lot easier for the consumer. Then again, as the video shows a couple ordering drinks of one of the Microsoft Surface tables , I ponder what business would let customers put their drinks and dirty fingers (from eating the food they just ordered) on their brand spanking new $5000 table (this price is purely speculative... I have absolutely *no* idea what the RRP for one of these things would be).

And what about the home consumers. I can see the application working from many points of view. From using it as a Media player, to a photo organizer to a very convenient way to do shopping... Now the question is, who in the wider consumer market will
a) spend what I would expect to be a reasonable sum of money for one of these
b) if you have kids, there is no way in hell you would want to have this thing in the living room, or any child-accessible place for that matter. unless of course it comes with a special "reject-all-foreigh-substances", is unbreakable and unscratchable...

I guess I am sounding a bit pessimistic about this grande new product, but don't get me wrong, I can see the benefits and the applications and the fact thats its just plain cool.

One of the features shown in the videos on the Microsoft website is the ability to simply put your phone on this table and according to sync settings (I presume there would be something like that) it will sync the photos/contacts etc. to your Microsoft Surface device. This is an absolutely awesome concept, of course we will all need to either upgrade our phones and/or other such portable devices or install some kind of software on it (this would be a nice solution, a-la Apple iSync).

In the end, I would really like to see Microsoft Surface in action in a commercial environment, I think it would work rather well. On the other hand I am a little skeptic about the feasibility of it as a consumer device. I guess the boys at Microsoft know what they're doing though, it's been in development for about 6 or 7 years now (well, from concept start).