Five Years of PC Storage Performance Compared 90
theraindog writes "PC storage has come a long way in the last few years. Perpendicular recording tech has fueled climbing capacities, 10k-RPM spindle speeds have migrated from SCSI to Serial ATA, Native Command Queuing has made mechanical drives smarter, and a burgeoning SSD market looks set to fundamentally change the industry. The Tech Report has taken a look back at the last four and a half years of PC storage solutions, probing the capacity and performance of a whopping 70 different notebook and desktop hard drives, SSDs, and exotic RAM disks. There's a lot of test data to digest, but the overall trends are easy to spot, potentially foretelling the future of PC storage."
Re:It is said... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Technology moves so fast... (Score:4, Interesting)
Not only you get more and more gigabytes per hard drive every year, the whole world also gets a massive quantity of new storage space.
And yet, we keep on getting 'No space left on device' errors.
Re:why so many pages? (Score:2, Interesting)
not much has changed with spinning platters.
Actually, I was surprised by the results for magnetic storage which showed a 2-3x performance gain over the older generations.
Pretty amazing for a technology that was supposedly as "good as it's going to get".
Seems perpendicular recording helped quite a bit allowing drives to get much bigger and increase in performance, mag drives may not be at the end of their rope yet.
Noise (Score:5, Interesting)
Interesting that there appear to be no subjective or objective noise measurements (I did not read the entire article, as some moron has seen fit to split it across twelve pages). I remember when 7200 rpm drives first came out, they were aimed at the server market and a RAID array of them made the room sound like there was a generator running. The 7200 rpm drive in my recent iMac is whisper quiet by comparison.
I assume the newest 15,000 rpm drives are similarly noisy.