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Five Years of PC Storage Performance Compared

Posted by timothy on from the professor-it-seems-to-be-getting-cheaper dept.

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."

9 of 90 comments (clear)

  1. Overall Trends by basementman · · Score: 5, Funny

    The overall trend on one page instead of 12 is that storage is getting cheaper, bigger and faster. Oh boy...

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    1. Re:Overall Trends by JustinOpinion · · Score: 5, Informative

      on one page instead of 12

      The Firefox Add-on AutoPager is your friend: automatically loads the next page inline as you scroll downwards. Turns multi-page sites into the single page they are supposed to be. Works great with many popular pages, including search results... and idiotic news sites.

    2. Re:Overall Trends by Vegeta99 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      That, sir, if the Comment of the Week right there.

  2. Re:It is said... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Are you implying that your disk isn't hard enough?

  3. Re:It is said... by mrsteveman1 · · Score: 5, Funny

    Well it used to be floppy so we're improving

  4. Re:A similar history will play out for SSDs by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

  5. Re:It is said... by pitchpipe · · Score: 5, Funny

    Now it's in a solid state!

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    Look where all this talking got us, baby.
  6. Thorough article backed up with a lot of data by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  7. Noise by CmdrPorno · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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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