Not Much Happening in Hard Drives This Year 449
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."
"I am, therefore I am." -- Akira
No news (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:What about reliability? (Score:5, Interesting)
as for reliability, most HD's are acceptable, but you can never fully rely on them to never fail, you must always have a backup system for important data.
speed is one of the areas which is always welcome for improvement (until of course it reaches the max interface speed, eg 150mB/sec for SATA)
Re:What I would like to see... (Score:2, Interesting)
Drives, hard and otherwise (Score:5, Interesting)
For consumers, that can mean qualitative improvements through passing quantitative thresholds. Buy 2 HDs instead of 1, make a RAID, and watch both uptime and fault recovery become minor bumps in the road, rather than a job-threatening days-long surprise nightmare. While filling the coffers of the vendors, who can reinvest in integrating that kind of redundancy in the HD unit itself. This year's nonevents might just give sysadmins the chance to become the most obviously important link in the IT chain, eclipsing the usually exaggerated developer rockstars.
FWIW, HD consumers probably aren't defined by "HDs", but rather storage in any medium, determined by usage. So the real news in "HD" is really Flash memory, which is seeing huge leaps in capacity, cheapness, perfomance and manageability. When will someone ship a $100 SDIO 1GB/WiFi card? With gumpack-sized, 8-SDIO-socketed battery for a pocket-PSAN (Personal Storage Area Network)? Or start sewing these things into hats and sweatjackets?
400gb @ 35cents/gb (Score:5, Interesting)
I have 3x200gb, 2x160gb, 2x120gb, 4x80gb (and more down the line).
The 200gbs are running at 83% full because... they all mirror each other.
Yup I know it's particularly anal, but I'll agree with the first post: We need more reliable drives. All of my photos are backed up 2x on DVD- one goes into a jukebox, the other goes onto a spindle, and all are stuffed into something called CDStorageMaster (fun proggy).
The HDs mirror each other but I've not yet had time to test a catastrophic failure of this. I had a manual raid before and, when my system crashed due to a bad PSU (note: Antec replaced it free of charge) I was eventually able to get all the drives back up and running, but I was left with a very nasty taste of bad-dynamic disks in my mouth.
So please... more storage at 35cents/gb and I'll be happy. Or 3.5 cents/gb would make me happier, but one can hope.
Re:What about reliability? (Score:2, Interesting)
I bought this box in mid-2001. I'm on my 4th HD and 3rd graphics card. The rest is all very much alive and kicking.
A hard drive is a critical component. Its emphasis should be on reliability FIRST and then everything else.
Re:What about reliability? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:What about reliability? (Score:2, Interesting)
Most of my hard drives are a couple of years old and I have no problems with them. And this is coming from a guy that uses his machines non-stop. Some are on all day processing data or converting shows I recorded on my PC DVR to a more compact format.
You get what you pay for. I don't skimp on my hard drives, I buy well reviewed models from manufacturers I trust.
But, I guess some people are just unlucky.
Re:What about reliability? (Score:4, Interesting)
There's not going to be much of anything this year (Score:2, Interesting)
Incase anyone here hasn't noticed the tech industry IS still slowing down in advancements, especially the desktop PC.
Anyone who put a tiny bit more effort into buying a PC within 18-36 months ago (should) still find their machine runs most things today perfectly well.
There's simply nothing to upgrade to worth the $ / performance ratio of 2 or 3 years ago.
Because (Score:3, Interesting)
I think it's all about cost (Score:3, Interesting)
What is really *necessary* (marketable)? Size? Do consumers care about the size of the HD in their computer? Nope. Accoustics? Modern drives are pretty quiet. Consumers are used to noisy fans anyway... most don't care.
What consumers want is cheap. That's why dell makes money. That's why Apple released the mac mini.
IMHO the thing HD companies need to figure out is how to get the fast large drives they have now, at a lower price.
*THAT* is the forecast for 2005. Cheaper drives.
I do think though we'll see marginal improvement in flash storage, and small HD's... for mp3 players, PDA's and other devices. But nothing groundbreaking.
This year's economy is about *price*. People want more for less...
the company that delivers it, will be rewarded with customers. The ones that fail: will not succeed.
Re:Storage (Score:5, Interesting)
' hdparm -c1 -d1
' time badblocks -c 256 -n -s -v
--Using this method on newly-delivered HDs has allowed me to RMA them right away, before they fail with MY data on them.
How about notebook features? (Score:5, Interesting)
Sure 4200rpm may save battery life, but they're so god aweful slow. Why don't they make a drive that has variable rpm? You could even have the OS control the speed: 4200 when on battery and 7200 when plugged into an outlet. Maybe even have an override so you can make it fast at the expense of battery life, should you want to.
What about the sales? (Score:2, Interesting)
The point? Something is happening. Why are they selling off drives like this? Oversupply? Switch to SATA?
Re:What about reliability? (Score:3, Interesting)
Dear Seagate, (Score:5, Interesting)
form factor terabyte drive. Instead lets concentrate on
two things:
a) faster. much faster
b) self mirroring (ie raid 1) drives in the same form
factor.
The first is obviously a desire everybody wants.
The second is similar I guess to dual core cpu's vs
dual cpu's. Take a drive and instead of making it 500GB
give me 2 200GB drives on seperate controllers and power
supplies with an internal interface that allows one to
mirror the other. Seemlessly.
While fault tolerance should never be confused with a
'backup', something like this would be very useful. With
giant capacities now prevalent, most consumers have given
up on backing up. But by offering a self contained
fault tolerance you allow the consumer to easily chose
between giant capacity or smaller size but some safety
built in.
For the performance crowd, many who now use raid 10 arrays,
you cut the drive clutter in half. Two bays, not 4 (or 4
not 8). Perhaps you could even get better thermal
peformance than 2 independent drives.
Re:What about reliability? (Score:3, Interesting)
As for me personally? I keep a couply things on my computer that so far has lead me to install 400GB worth of disk space in my computer. Music Videos are one that take up Tens of Gigs. Pictures are another (I have so many they take up tens of gigs as well in JPG format). I run a website with the.
As for the average consumer not needing 160GB? That is enough to store ~18 hours of HDTV content in a VCR. When we finally do get the dam digital transision done with, consumers will be buying up PVRs and that is what they will be using for storage.
Re:Dear Seagate, (Score:3, Interesting)
We have exactly the thing for you! It's called buying two drives.
Regards,
Seagate
Seriously, things like this have been proposed, and even implemented in the past. It's always turned out cheaper, simpler, and more reliable to just buy two standard drives.
Re:Storage (Score:3, Interesting)