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."

What about reliability?

[liquid stereo]

No more technology is needed. How about reliability?

Storage

[spike hay]

I'd like to see more speed, but capacity hardly matters to anybody these days, now that 200+ gig drives can be had for ridiculously cheap.

What I would like to see...

[CastrTroy]

What I would like to see is more and cheaper network attached storage devices like the Ximeta Netdisk. With networks being so popular in homes, it's amazing that they don't have one place to store their files without a actually having a specific computer turned on. And most people, including myself, don't see the need in devoting an entire computer to serving files.

TFA says consumers aren't demanding more

[filmmaker]

Part of the reason why hard drives haven't kept up with other components is because consumers don't demand more features. Seems like people don't want their hard drives to do more - though I know that I'd like better performance when working with large video files.

Article? Or usenet rant?

[coupland]

This article is terrible. Looks like nothing more than a usenet rant to me. The author decries the terrible progress of the storage industry, obviously completely ignorant of the fact that the storage industry has consistently bested Moore's Law for at least a decade. If processors increased in speed at the pace that hard drives increase in size, we'd have processors in the tens of gigahertz today. Besides moaning about the slow pace of one of the fastest-paced areas in the industry, what is it the author thinks they should be focusing on? In his own words:

we would certainly like to see a set pattern where users can expect something significant in this industry

"Something." That's as specific as the author gets. Storage capacity is doubling every 12 months, but we need to see something significant. Nothing in particular, mind you. Just something. Go figure it out, come back to us when you're done. That's 5 mins of my life I'll never get back...

A chance to take a breath...

[Dzimas]

I somehow doubt that HD manufacturers have pre-announced all of their little secrets. That said, there comes a time with every technology when things mature - there are a limited number of bits you can fit into a finite space. My feeling is that solid state drives will be the next extremely big thing. 1GB flash memory is no longer a "big deal" and I suspect that with a few significant innovations, solid state might dominate. It would certainly reduce power and space requirements (I can just imagine Steve Jobs demoing the headless Mac Shuffle right now: Smaller than a stick of gum, except for the port adapter...)

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Re:Storage

[GreatDrok]

I'd like to see more speed, but capacity hardly matters to anybody these days, now that 200+ gig drives can be had for ridiculously cheap.

You know, 200+ gigs isn't going to go very far once you start storing your DVD collection. Certainly mine would occupy over 2TB if I were to rip it to disc and use a network media player to access it.

Video, especially HD, is going to eat these discs pretty quick. I remember my first PC (previously I had avoided x86 boxes) had 200MB of disc and that seemed huge at the time (able to run a pretty complete Slackware install). My current machine (ten years on) has 200GB and it is already damn full.

Re:What about reliability?

[JPriest]

Exactly, HDD read/write times are one of the worst bottle necks in computing today because they rely on actual mechanical movement. The new HDD technologies that come out this year will be what mom and pop are using in 4 yers to store files from their digital cameras, camcorders, music, and media center.

Also, cheaper/better consumer HDD's = things like more mail storage, web space, voice mail capacity etc. from providers.

price

[dickens]

So the only way for them to move is lower prices.

Sounds like a good year for consumers. Who needs more than a couple hundred GB anyway ?

Re:What about reliability?

[Znork]

"very few people would need >160gb"

Dont have a media system yet, eh?

Let me tell you, when you start recoring video and storing your DVD's on disk for easy access, not even multiterabyte disks will seem enough.

Add to that storage for backups which doubles or triples your needed space and you start seeing the problem. Then add mirroring and longterm archives...

"but you can never fully rely on them to never fail"

I'd rather say you can fully rely on them to eventually fail. Which is why you need so much space for backups.

"speed is one of the areas which is always welcome"

Welcome, but not essential. For actual system performance you're often better off with more memory for disk caches. If you have some very intensive applications needing very high speed you can improve performance with striping anyway, and in desktop systems it's often a better solution as heat and noise from faster disks make them unsuitable.

Re:Article? Or usenet rant?

[Speare]

obviously completely ignorant of the fact that the storage industry has consistently bested Moore's Law for at least a decade

Can you please tell me how you think that Moore's Law [intel.com] is supposed to relate to the capacity of persistent, non-volatile data media? Or could you please just stop suggesting that it applies?

HD tech doesn't move at the same pace?

[Anonymous Coward]

My first computer was a 14MHz 80286 in 1988. It had a 60 MB hard drive. I now have a AMD 2.1 GHz chip and 4 drive RAID of 75GB drives plus a couple of other drives. In other words, my speed has gone up less than a thousand times, while my storage capacity has gone up almost 10,000 times.

Sure, they aren't as exciting as CPUs, but hard drive tech seems to have a pretty good track record.

Re:What about reliability?

[wernercd]

No doubt. I've had an external for 2+ years that has been dropped, around the world twice now (Second deployment to Iraq for me), taken apart, put back together, reformated a couple times... Needless to say this thing should have died a long time ago

I think reliability is fine in a majority of drives. No different than operating a car. Gotta take care of it to get it to last 100-200k+ miles.

How about a drive that lasts longer then a year?

[sideshow]

I've had three drives in a row that fail to spin up after 12 months.

Re:What about reliability?

[kannibal_klown]

I'm sure the original post realizes that.

However, I think he's speaking as a whole. If you take all of the PC owners, how many do you think actually need THAT much space? Sure, there's a alot of people (including myself) that need that kind of space. But as a whole, we only make up a small percentage

If you take into account all of the people that just use their machines for email, web browsing, taxes, and maybe the occasional game of solitaire then they really don't need that much space. Most people don't need their HP Pavilions to have 100+ GB of space.

But increasing capacity is definately important for us "power users," as well as the obvious professionals. Capacity is good, but for Joe Sixpack what doesn't know the difference between Gigabyte and Gigahert it's not that important.

Re: If you need more than a few hundred gigs

[Alwin Henseler]

If you need more than a few hundred gigs, then you are a theif or a pervert ..

You're so right, I must be both. Thanks for enlighting me. Screw Slashdot for the evening, back to pr0n surfing, much more fun than reading up on domain hijacks...

.. and belong behind bars.

Yup, but then you've got half the population behind bars. So you need the other half to guard them. Who's gonna feed everybody in that scenario? Or do some nanotech-science or writing /. comments on the side?

Just saw "Revenge of the nerds" on TV (I kid you not). Damn, that movie sucks!!!

Re:Article? Or usenet rant?

[Saeger]

Yes, it would be more accurate to refer to it as The Law of Accelerating Returns [kurzweilai.net], as it's more general, but unfortunately most people are only aware of the popularized Moore's Law as it applies to transistor count, so it'll continue to get used in its stead. It makes the same point (unless you're a pedant).

Re:What about reliability?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've gone through about 12 hard drives on my dektop PC because of increasing storage needs, and I use the hell out of them, they truly get a workout...

and yet I've never had a single failure. Not one. Not one HD failure in the many laptops Ive had either.
Not one back in my mac days.
In fact, since I started using systems with HD's back in the 80s, not one.

What the heck are you DOING?

Re:Notebook hard drives not a dud

[CajunArson]

I want a laptop hard drive that doesn't use any battery power at all
Well if we are going to avoid rewriting the laws of physics (no they don't only exist to make money for the evil batter manufacturers) you had better tell me which non-battery source you want to power your non-existent harddrive. I hate to break it to you, but even if I could encode data at the quantum level using some insanely advanced storage technology.... it would still require some power.

Article is completely wrong

[Arch_dude]

1) Disk perforamnce gains have outpaced CPU performance gains for at least the last decade. 2) The author simply does not understand HD design constraints. For a given RPM, the data transfer speed increases as the density per platter increases. This is constrained by the Magical electronics that read and write the bits on the disk. So, twice the density also implies twice the bulk data transfer rate (not the burst rate.) 3) SATA. SATA is now being sold at (or very near) the price of EIDE. Last A year ago SATA sold at a premium of $20-$30/drive. By the end of 2005, SATA will be cheaper than EIDE for otherwise-equal drives. 4) Price. Price/gig went from $1.00 at the beginning of 2004 to $.50 at the beginning of 2005, at the "sweet spot." The current "sweet spot" is 250GB. There is not reason to doubt that the price/Gig will reach $.25 by the end of the year. 5) interest in 10K and 15K RPM is misplaced for most applications. Speed affects rotational delay and nothing else. Bulk transfer rate is more important in most applications (point 2 above.) If it spins twice as fast but has half the density, it has the same bulk transfer rate. 6) interest in SCSI is outdated. SATA with one (competent) controller per disk has better characeristics.

Re:What about reliability?

[Lord Kano]

Acceptable my ass. I haven't seen a hard drive last more than a year since, oh, single-digit capacities.

If that's the case, seriously, you're doing something wrong.

My linux machine is using a 20GB hard drive that I bought in 1999. It still works flawlessly.

Basically, all new hardware goes into my main machine first, what comes out of this one gets passed down among the other boxen. So, most hardware is at least a year old before it gets passed down.

If you haven't had a hard drive that lasted for more than a year, there is something about your setup that is simply not right. Maybe you have dirty power. Maybe you shouldn't use your computer on tha back of a moving go cart. Whatever it is, such a short lifespan out of any of your hardware should tell you that there is something out of the ordinary with the way you're using it.

LK

Re:What about reliability?

[Eric604]

Might be the environment, do you smoke?

Re:If you need more than a few hundred gigs

[DreadPiratePizz]

This is flat out wrong. Digital video, content you create yourself is incredibly demanding when it comes to storage. DVCAM video is 3 MB/sec, and let's not even talk about HD. If you're in the film/video industry, 160 GB is too little to even consider.