Slashdot Mirror
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."
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
No more technology is needed. How about reliability?
I can't wait for the next two Slashdot stories: "The sky is still blue" and "There's nothing interesting to report."
The calculated scores don't carry much weight.
Nothing particularly surprising here.
Did anything happen today that does matter?
sulli
RTFJ.
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...)
"No news Is good news?"
I think you mean "no news IS news".
There's nothing Intelligent about Intelligent Design.
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!
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?
--
make install -not war
Ever since Maxtor announced (but didn't ship) a 320GB drive in August 2003, things have moved too slowly in the PC (3.5") drive market. Maxtor finally shipped 300G and that was king for a while before Hitachi (and now others) shipped 400G. The lack of motion is very unusual compared to the historical size increases we've seen over the last 20 years.
I think the article doesn't make it clear that manufacturers' focus has moved to several other areas:
- 2.5" drives for use in servers (density of machines, not data)
- 1.8" drives for iPods (now up to 80G)
- 1" drives for mini-iPods and CF cards
- sub-1" drives (Cornice...) for CF and cell phones
Even though some of us need TBs of storage, most of the CE world would be happy with 10G for their music/video-recording.
Even if you could, flash has a limited number of writes/rewrites (between thousands and hundreds of thousands, as far as I know and depending on whom you believe), and it wouldn't be well-suited for typical use as a "hard drive"--and definitely not one that has a swap file. And to top it all off, any capacity comparable to that of a hard drive is way more expensive.
R.Mo
This year we're expecting the max size on 7200RPM notebook (2.5") drives to jump from 60GB all the way to 100GB, a huge jump.
And I'd also expect to see a jump in 5400RPM storage capacity from the current 100GB.
My ideal notebook drive for 2005 would be a 100GB 7200RPM drive with a 16MB cache, SATA(2?), and NCQ. But who knows when that will happen. The best drive available today is a 60GB 7200RPM drive with 8MB of cache, though as I mentioned earlier that will jump to 100GB this year.
Everything worth inventing has been invented. We've hit the ceiling. No more unexpected advances. Have a nice day. Smoke if you've got em.
Faith: n. -- That human impulse that drives them to steal appliances when the power goes out
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.
The reality is that the hard drive, in addition to the floppy drive, is reaching extinction. The density of flash memory is increasing so rapidly that, within 10 years, the hard drive will not be necessary. IBM saw this inevitable demise of the hard drive and sold its hard drive business to a competitor.
Flash memory has still a lot of improvements to do in the write cycles department (the number of times you can write to it before it fails), which basically hasn't changed a lot since it was introduced to these days. The exact number dpendens on the manufacturer, but it ranges between 10k and 100k. It's also still very slow.
But i agree, hard drives will be phased out in the short term, probably by new technlogies like MRAM memory, which doesn't have the limited write cycles problem and is as fast as DRAM.
Generalíssimo Francisco Franco is still dead!
I used to have a good sig...
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 ?
size increases, but that doesn't count as an improvment..
I mean, if they would put neon on them, now THAT would be an improvement.
sheesh
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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
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.
The best bang/buck EIDE hard drive you can get today is ~40cents per GB for a 160GB drive; any smaller capacity and you'll be paying more for less. For a little less than 50cents/GB you can get a 250,200, or 180GB drive where the increased storage density might be worth the extra few pennies per GB. The 400GB and 300GB monsters are under $1/GB, but still aren't a very good value (unless you have money burning a hole in your pocket and value bragging rights).
So, IMO, the best bang/buck for your average guy is putting two to four 160GB or 250GB drives in RAID 1 or 5.
--
Power to the Peaceful
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.
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.
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?
my harddrive's had lots of changes this year. I added more memory to my harddrive, I added a new video to it to play them new games. Now my computer, that hasn't been upgrade since I bought it from Viewsonic.....
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
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.
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.
The original dvd's do count as backups (as long as diskspace is cramped, at least) but I prefer having online backups, as it's much faster to recover from a crash with a backup-to-disk than to re-rip from DVD's. Plus, you usually know when your backup medium is hosed when it's on disk, which you might not on optical storage (altho it's more likely for DVD's to remain intact now that the video is on disk and dont need handling all the time).
But, yes, the video volumes tend to have to get along without online backup. Until those terabyte disks arrive at least.
I don't think that's right. I've got one of those Ximeta thingies, and it just does some USB-over-ethernet trick (I assume) to be attached to any machine. I hear there is multi-write support (for windows only of course) now, perhaps that requires a machine to be the "master" host.