Latest SCSI Drive Reviewed

Sivar writes "StorageReview got their hands on a Maxtor Atlas 10K V, the first SCSI hard drive in more than two years to double capacity. Considering how quickly storage was improving just a few years ago, and other news like Intel's cancellation of the 4GHz Pentium IV despite AMD's lead you have to wonder if the traditional predictions of the end of Moore's Observation are actually beginning to come true."

Comments

RAM memory increases slowed down too

[peter303]

Its been three years since RAM prices changed significantly. Its still $100 - $200 a gigabyte. The current chip fell to its commodity price of @$4 fairly quickly after introduction and stayed there. Some RAM companies have been fine for price colussion. In the meantime flash memory price has plumented from $500 a gigabyte to $100.

Moore's Magnetism Law?

[evilviper]

Since when does Moore's law apply to hard drives? Does fitting double the transistors in half the space make your hard drive have a higher capacity?

Obviously, nobody remembers the hard drive capacity lull that happened about `99 or so. Hard drives were quickly nearing their technological limits. Then, IBM got GMR heads working in hard drives, and everyone has been pushing that technology as fast as they could. Perhaps that technology, too, has reached it's limit.

You could be an optimist and say that another break-through will come along soon enough, but I'm not so optimistic. IBM's exit from the Hard Drive market is just another sign of what's happening. The trend is to cut costs down to nill, so you can sell your product a few cents cheaper than the competition. This results both in product development and manufacturing being outsourced, and in research unlikely to produce short-term results, being extensively cut, if not eliminated.

So, we may see a new technology comming along that will allow for increased storage capacity, but I think that's much less likely now than it was just a few years ago. What's more, this trend has more of a long-term impact. We might find something new this time around, but could still be in trouble, let's say, 5 years from now, when we need something new, and nothing is forthcomming due to lack of research.

I can already see the solid-state advocates scrambling to reply, so I'll also add that research is needed to improve the capacity and lower the price of memory chips as well.