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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."
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No more technology is needed. How about reliability?
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.
If you don't understand any of my sayings, come to me in private and I shall take you in my German mouth.
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.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
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.
I Want To Believe
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...
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...)
I think that what the industry should focus on in this point in time should be the miniturization of such memory storage devices so as to fit them into smaller devices such as cell phones, PocketPCs (ugh), etc... most of the technology is already out there, it just hasn't been utilized to its full potential on a widespread commercial level. The most notable exception that comes to mind would be Apple, with their 40gb iPod.... if only we had as much storage on our Palms as well!
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 ?
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 is supposed to relate to the capacity of persistent, non-volatile data media? Or could you please just stop suggesting that it applies?
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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.
I've had three drives in a row that fail to spin up after 12 months.
Hollow words will burn and hollow men will burn.
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...
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!!!
Yes, it would be more accurate to refer to it as The Law of Accelerating Returns, 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).
Power to the Peaceful
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.
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
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.
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.