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Hard Drive Memory Lane
Chabil Ha' writes "CNET has gathered together some good old nostalgia from the photo vault. What high-tech product advances the fastest? It's probably the hard drive. The capacity doubles easily every two years and sometimes every year, faster even than the chip progress described by Moore's Law. The first drives took up storage closets. Now, a 5GB drive can fit in a phone."
Huh? What kind of comparison is that?
The capacity of harddrive has steadily improved over the years but the performance of harddrives has improved at an abysmally slow rate. Five years ago I would have not like to see the average desktop harddive at 7200 rpm with some into 10,000. I know better options are available, but those aren't in your average home computer either.
Because we don't yet have the manufacturing technology to place each individual electron on a platter, heads that can read and write to those ultra-dense platters, or the circuitry to support it. Look at something like GMR. They couldn't possibly have used it in hard drives 5 years before it was discovered.
It may sound ironic due to the above, but the computer revolution hasn't been about technological leaps. No, it's been about fast but incremental improvements to manufacturing.
I guess the better answer is, computer technology is close behind current scientific discoveries... If there was a jump, it would have to be artifically created by holding back on developing products with new, slightly better, technology. I really don't see your problem with improvement. It's not as if they are forcing you to upgrade your hard drive every year. I'm using an older 40GB hard drive in this machine right now, and I'm perfectly happy with it. When it fails (out of warranty) I'll go buy one that is many, many times larger, so it's sure not incremental improvement for me.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
I mean, instead of releasing a hard drive 2x the size of last year, why can't they skip a generation and release one 10x the last year? What was stopping them 5 years ago releasing a drive of the size now on offer?
I think you've got a forgivably flawed understanding of where the increases in disk size come from.
Most differentiation in disk size comes from having different numbers of the same-sized platter. If the current technology allows for a 20GB platter, then the manufactuer might put out 20GB, 40GB, and 60GB models, just by using more platters. (You might also see 30GB, 50GB, if they use only one side of a platter.)
Changes in platter density are much less common, but you'd never know it just by looking at the final disk size. If the technology advances enough to allow a 60GB platter, then you'll see the same 60GB disks, only now they'll be cheaper, and in the company of 120GB and 180GB drives.
It takes almost no time to make different platter configurations, but it takes months and years to make significant increases in density. Five years ago, we were just beginning to see 20GB platters. This year we're seeing 100GB+ platters. Not that even the 10x improvement you're asking for. But, if you compare a 1-platter drive from 2000 (20GB) with a 5-platter drive from 2005 (500GB), it sounds like there has been a much greater change. than there actually was.
Seems almost like a conspiracy
Nope. If disk manufacturers had a better product, they'd damn sure be trying to sell it to you. They aren't holding out on you.