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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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there is not much demand for higher capacities (very few people would need >160gb).
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)
Marge, get me your address book, 4 beers, and my conversation hat.
Actually, the Ximeta disk requires a computer to share the disk before it's available on the network for other computers. This is a serious flaw in the engeneering!
Most of the best news for most HD consumers is price drops, which will probably accelerate. Most of the HD price reflects recouping investment in R&D and retooling factories, not a per-unit cost. So HD companies aren't spending lots more money this year - that means they'll be charging even less, competing on price without other differentiators.
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?
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make install -not war
Thats what I'm waiting for.
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.
Acceptable my ass. I haven't seen a hard drive last more than a year since, oh, single-digit capacities.
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.
Four hard drives in four years? I'll admit modern disks are built poorly, but that seems excessive. It's possible that you have had a string of bad luck, but if they all failed in the same machine, you might want to check you power supply and/or cooling setup. The drives might have been killed.
"God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh." -Voltaire
Really?
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.
That's where RAID comes in. I am building a simple data acquisition system at work and it has to have a large capacity for storage and be reliable but have a low cost. I will get 2x 200GB drives for RAID-1 and a nice power supply + good cooling. Don't know which brands to choose for the drives. I used IBM at home and after 3 years I get some corruption once in a while, but I also have RAID-0 at home (good enough for games, web and email).
Sure we'll see one or 2 fantastic things but nothing like 1999 -> 2002 for hardware innovation.
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.
They've been focusing mainly of storage space and not performance. The hard drive is still the bottle neck on most machines. I can barely dent my 240 gig HD. I'd much rather have a 80 gig HD that was 4x as fast. Yes, there are pratical uses for a 400 Gig hd, file server, AV, etc. But for the majority (read: regular consumers, not slashdotters) of people it's just unneeded at this point in time.
Think about it... storage is pretty fast already. The average consumer doesn't need any faster. Those who need speed are using Serial ATA, SCSI, RAID, and other acronyms.
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.
I run this test on EVERY new/used hard drive I buy, before putting it into regular use:
/dev/hdX ' /dev/hdX '
' 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.
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== WolfriderV6 == I'm willing to admit that *I just might* be wrong... Are you??
I want a drive with more features for notebooks...
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.
I wanted a bigger drive back in June, and the prices were really quite high. I finally bought one in September, by then the prices on a 160GB drive had dropped to a respectible $130 (with rebates). Now the same is on sale for $59 in the latest BestBuy flyer.
The point? Something is happening. Why are they selling off drives like this? Oversupply? Switch to SATA?
Until a month ago, one of my harddrives was the only remaining part from my computer that I originally built 5 years ago. I have replaced all of the other parts. Finally a month ago I got another 250gb drive and took out my IBM 30gb only because I didn't have room for it anymore.
"It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists." -Ludwig Wittgenstein
Lets take a break for the quest to be first with a small
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.
Hi, I am working for a company that in the next year is going to be purchasing at least 525 Terrabytes of hard drives. You think size doesn't matter to us? The larger they get the more we can fit into our raid server. And the cheaper per GB it will cost us. And yes, we plan to be operating at nearly full capacity of the drives. We do need that amount of space.
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.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
A better approach would be to use smartctl -t long /dev/hda and let the drive test itself. Modern drives will mask many errors from the user, so your badblocks test will gloss over problems that a firmware test would report.
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