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Five Years of PC Storage Performance Compared
theraindog writes "PC storage has come a long way in the last few years. Perpendicular recording tech has fueled climbing capacities, 10k-RPM spindle speeds have migrated from SCSI to Serial ATA, Native Command Queuing has made mechanical drives smarter, and a burgeoning SSD market looks set to fundamentally change the industry. The Tech Report has taken a look back at the last four and a half years of PC storage solutions, probing the capacity and performance of a whopping 70 different notebook and desktop hard drives, SSDs, and exotic RAM disks. There's a lot of test data to digest, but the overall trends are easy to spot, potentially foretelling the future of PC storage."
It is said that pr0n drives certain sectors of technology. Unfortunately, I have yet to find a single drive to store my whole collection... :-(
The overall trend on one page instead of 12 is that storage is getting cheaper, bigger and faster. Oh boy...
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The current models don't spin very quickly...
That's very observant of you to notice that SSDs don't spin very quickly. But I'm not sure I agree with your assessment that they'll spin faster in the future.
Looks like slashdot is on its high horse, saying "of course SSDs are faster, duh, what a waste of time!".
And yet if somebody had written that in a blog, everybody would merrily trolling about how "anecdotal evidence is irrelevant, BTW my HDD is teh fastest".
I don't understand it. Somebody goes to the trouble of comparing a shit-load of drives in a variety of tests, and apparently the results are boring/irrelevant.
Slashdotters are always bitching about lack of empirical evidence for claims, yet when an article come along with abundant information to back up its conclusions, it dosn't get any credit.
One thing I find impresive about the evolution of storage: 20TB was the total hard drive space manufactured in 1995, just 14 years ago. And today some sites are offering 1TB storage for free, and it isn't hard to imagine they have much more than 100.000 users.
Not only you get more and more gigabytes per hard drive every year, the whole world also gets a massive quantity of new storage space.
And yet, we keep on getting 'No space left on device' errors.
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summary - intel x25 is super fast, super expensive. not much has changed with spinning platters.
Hmm not the trends I've noticed. From what I've paid attention to:
1) Spinning platters hasn't changed that much, but they've gone down substantially in price. The sweet spot on capacity/cost including SATA connections and everything has gone up considerably and is now at 1.5TB/disk, which are only minimally more expensive than 1.0TB while the 2.0TB disks are top of the line and very expensive.
2) SSD prices were in freefall up until around march. Since then there's been 4 months of increased prices, very abnormal for computer equipment. Not sure if this means the prices will go much slower from here, if so that's bad because they're still at enthusiast pricing.
Basicly, it looks to me like we're header for SSDs as primary drives and 1.5TB+ disks for vast disk arrays that SSDs won't touch for a long while, they still have a 25:1 cost disadvantage compared to the cheapest bulk storage. Now I still got plenty old disks, but if I replaced all 12 in my Antec 1200 with the cheapest 1.5TB disk you can now deliver 18TB for less than 2000$ for the whole system, it'd be close to 100$/TB but slightly over. That's just freakishly huge compared to five years ago, so I still say things are moving along nicely.
Also I didn't get the Intel SSD, but I did get the 120GB Vertex and it flies. I can start a torrent doing 2MB/s random writes and I barely notice I'm doing it. The world is moving forward a lot, but honesly with faster Internet I don't feel quite the same need to store everything locally anyway. Still, it's nice to have 32GB on the USB stick in my pocket for when I need something. I never thought I'd say this because I've been rather insatisfiable when it comes to computers, but things are starting to bottom out. Even a pack rat like me is starting to wonder what I need all this space for, it's moving past nice-to-have into cool-but-why territory.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Interesting that there appear to be no subjective or objective noise measurements (I did not read the entire article, as some moron has seen fit to split it across twelve pages). I remember when 7200 rpm drives first came out, they were aimed at the server market and a RAID array of them made the room sound like there was a generator running. The 7200 rpm drive in my recent iMac is whisper quiet by comparison.
I assume the newest 15,000 rpm drives are similarly noisy.
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