Not Much Happening in Hard Drives This Year

yahooooo writes "CoolTechZone.com has an article that talks about desktop hard drive developments in 2005. It looks this year is going to be a dud for the storage industry."

Re:What about reliability?

[Lisandro]

Make that both reilabilty and speed for me. PATA/SATA disk are still lagging horribly behind stuff like SCSI disks and their 10k RPM offerings.

PS: If you want reilabilty for cheap, check the Seagate Barracuda series (i own this one [seagate.com]) - cheap, VERY reliable and also damn quiet. I can't tell if the thing is running or not by listening to it.

2004 was also a dud for PC HDDs

[PenguinOpus]

Ever since Maxtor announced (but didn't ship) a 320GB drive in August 2003, things have moved too slowly in the PC (3.5") drive market. Maxtor finally shipped 300G and that was king for a while before Hitachi (and now others) shipped 400G. The lack of motion is very unusual compared to the historical size increases we've seen over the last 20 years.

I think the article doesn't make it clear that manufacturers' focus has moved to several other areas:

- 2.5" drives for use in servers (density of machines, not data)
- 1.8" drives for iPods (now up to 80G)
- 1" drives for mini-iPods and CF cards
- sub-1" drives (Cornice...) for CF and cell phones

Even though some of us need TBs of storage, most of the CE world would be happy with 10G for their music/video-recording.

Re:Flash Memory Based 'Hard Drives'

[R.Mo_Robert]

Even if you could, flash has a limited number of writes/rewrites (between thousands and hundreds of thousands, as far as I know and depending on whom you believe), and it wouldn't be well-suited for typical use as a "hard drive"--and definitely not one that has a swap file. And to top it all off, any capacity comparable to that of a hard drive is way more expensive.

Notebook hard drives not a dud

[Guspaz]

This year we're expecting the max size on 7200RPM notebook (2.5") drives to jump from 60GB all the way to 100GB, a huge jump.

And I'd also expect to see a jump in 5400RPM storage capacity from the current 100GB.

My ideal notebook drive for 2005 would be a 100GB 7200RPM drive with a 16MB cache, SATA(2?), and NCQ. But who knows when that will happen. The best drive available today is a 60GB 7200RPM drive with 8MB of cache, though as I mentioned earlier that will jump to 100GB this year.

Re:Hard Disk Drive: End of an Era

[Lisandro]

The reality is that the hard drive, in addition to the floppy drive, is reaching extinction. The density of flash memory is increasing so rapidly that, within 10 years, the hard drive will not be necessary. IBM saw this inevitable demise of the hard drive and sold its hard drive business to a competitor.

Flash memory has still a lot of improvements to do in the write cycles department (the number of times you can write to it before it fails), which basically hasn't changed a lot since it was introduced to these days. The exact number dpendens on the manufacturer, but it ranges between 10k and 100k. It's also still very slow.

But i agree, hard drives will be phased out in the short term, probably by new technlogies like MRAM [wikipedia.org] memory, which doesn't have the limited write cycles problem and is as fast as DRAM.

Re:A chance to take a breath...

[bob65]

I, for one, can't wait until solid state drives replace the current hard drives. The big advantage I see would be noise and vibration elimination. Combine that with a cool-running processor with a passive heatsink, a fanless power supply, and videocards/motherboards without fans, and we might just be able to have a truely silent computer that does not get louder over time. Given that we can find a good case design with appropriate convection of course...

Re:What about reliability?

[Znork]

PVR's are simply so useful that the average joe will have them soon enough. Wether they'll buy them as tivo's or as a media pc doesnt really change the fact that it's the same disks and the same needed storage volumes. And if you count non-PC pvr's I'd argue it's getting more than 'very few' already.

Greetings from a 6 yr old HD.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm posting this after booting from a 10GB HD made by Western Digital. I got this HD back in 1999. As for shoddy stuff, I don't know what you've been buying.

$/GB

[Saeger]

Just thought I'd chime in with a quick report on the value of various hard drives.

The best bang/buck EIDE hard drive you can get today is ~40cents per GB for a 160GB drive; any smaller capacity and you'll be paying more for less. For a little less than 50cents/GB you can get a 250,200, or 180GB drive where the increased storage density might be worth the extra few pennies per GB. The 400GB and 300GB monsters are under $1/GB, but still aren't a very good value (unless you have money burning a hole in your pocket and value bragging rights).

So, IMO, the best bang/buck for your average guy is putting two to four 160GB or 250GB drives in RAID 1 or 5.

--

Re:What about reliability?

[ricochet81]

You should really think about cooling your HDDs, heat kills them, in my experience. You know those screws they come with? make sure you put all 4 in, tight. They help with the heat transfer. I have not had one hdd die in 5 years in my CoolerMaster case. The HDDs run room temperature to the touch. Cheap cases though.. I've had many HDDs die. I sense a pattern.

Re:What about reliability?

[Fweeky]

Seagate have been good for (S)ATA in my experience (and seems to be confirmed by StorageReview's reliability survey). A pair of 7200.7's should do you just fine (and they have 5 year warranties).

Re:What I would like to see...

[Pendragn_tk]

The Linksys NSLU2 is pretty cheap (around $80) and provides computer-less file sharing on home networks. As a plus, it runs Linux and can be hacked fairly easily. tk

Re:Backups?

[Znork]

The original dvd's do count as backups (as long as diskspace is cramped, at least) but I prefer having online backups, as it's much faster to recover from a crash with a backup-to-disk than to re-rip from DVD's. Plus, you usually know when your backup medium is hosed when it's on disk, which you might not on optical storage (altho it's more likely for DVD's to remain intact now that the video is on disk and dont need handling all the time).

But, yes, the video volumes tend to have to get along without online backup. Until those terabyte disks arrive at least.

wrong....

[Benley]

I don't think that's right. I've got one of those Ximeta thingies, and it just does some USB-over-ethernet trick (I assume) to be attached to any machine. I hear there is multi-write support (for windows only of course) now, perhaps that requires a machine to be the "master" host.

Re:How about notebook features?

[ceeam]

Remember guys - RPM per se means virtually nothing. I have 5400 Samsung drive and it has sustained read/write speed (>50 Megs/sec from Windows filesystem) more than all the 7200 Seagates I've seen (at similar volume). Also - don't forget than notebook drives are 2.5" and since have much smaller platter radius. Even if you have 7200 RPM drive with the same density you will have (much) lower data xfer rate than with the "big" drive. Actually, it mostly comes down to the density (roughly you may say that it increases with drive volume div number of working platters) and seek quality. All 7200 gives you for sure is increased heat and more noise. It's a pity that 5400 drives that are perfectly runnable without any cooling are extinct.