Getting Rid of the Disks

Kneht writes "Dan's Data has an interesting article on what it would cost to get rid of your HDDs and replace them with SSDs because hard drives suck. Several aspects are examined, such as required UPS, compact flash, etc. Read the article and you may get a new appreciation for your lowly 7200rpm drive." Funny, I was just thinking that I should start using 120GB disks as my removable media.

Comments

Take me to his dealer

[Quietti]

modern drives are pretty reliable, and highly compatible with each other

I wanna have some of what he's smoking, quick!

Seriously, I have IDE and SCSI drives that are about 10 years old (capacity is obviously small - in the 200 - 500mb range) and have almost no bad sectors; they still do a reliable job in routers and other boxes that don't require a lot of storage. Meanwhile, newer drives of 2Gb or larger regularly require replacements. Then, there's the problem of recent drive capacities being too large for the BIOSes of my "deprecated" computers, not to mention SCSI connector standards that change more often than the MTV Top 10.

The real problem, for an end-user, though, is the excessively generous storage capacities; as Cringely once pointed out, unless you are a graphic artist, your personal data probably fits well within 500Mb of storage. Why the hell is it that the smallest drives I can purchase nowadays are around 30Gb (120Gb for SCSI), at a time when my data storage needs still have not exceeded that 500Mb per user quota? And, no, my workstations do not suddenly have a use for larger drives either.

One cannot help but notice how manufacturer warranties reflect the lower quality, as well. Where we used to have 5 year warranties (which, in practice, meant that the drive actually performs well for about 10 years), current offerings are guaranteed for 1 year and last exactly that. There's been several recent cases e.g. with IBM's glass drives, where a replacement is required within 6 months from purchase.

I don't know about you, but I have better things to do than constantly wasting money on purchasing replacement drives and time on reinstalling everything on the new drive, only to find out that the BIOS cannot use such large drives, and cursing that I had to purchase a drive whose capacity is exactly 100 times what I can use.

Message to drive manufacturers: Gimme reliable and quiet 2 - 4Gb drives, using the good old 50-pin connectors in both IDE and SCSI flavours, but providing all the modern refinements of Ultra DMA100, etc. and guaranteed for 5 years or more. Make them affordable too. We don't want any more stinky throw-away media storage, thanks you.