Seagate To Stop Making 7200rpm Laptop HDDs

jones_supa writes "'We are going stop building our notebook 7200rpm hard disk drives at the end of 2013,' said David Burks, director of marketing and product management at Seagate Technology, during a conversation with X-bit labs. The mainstream market demand is expected shift to different products, such as hybrid drives. Users who need maximum performance and care about battery life have been choosing notebooks with SSDs for years now, whereas those who required capacity and moderate price do not really care about actual performance. With the introduction of third-generation solid-state hybrid drives later this year, Seagate will position them for performance- and capacity-demanding end-users. The company will also continue to offer 5400rpm HDDs for value notebooks."

Comments

Faster notebook drives.

[girlintraining]

They're not just for notebooks. Quiet and small form factor conventional drives have a place in things like Tivos and personal recording devices for TV, etc. If all the manufacturers bail out, we'll have to build larger devices like this to fill that niche. Unless, of course, SSDs suddenly drop in price... which they should have done by now, but hey... p-p-profit!

Re:Faster notebook drives.

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I suspect that that's why they are killing the faster ones(which are slightly noisier and run slightly hotter). The market for HDDs isn't so much drying up; but strategies other than 'make the hard drive rotate faster' for making storage perform better have been getting cheaper and better pretty aggressively.

With modern areal densities and codecs, if your bandwidth requirements are routinely saturating a 5400rpm drive, you probably have something a bit more serious than a DVR in mind. If occasional bursts are giving you trouble, you can put in a lot of RAM cache for what it would cost to switch to an SSD of equivalent size, and a mere 7200 probably wouldn't have saved you.

Re:Faster notebook drives.

[girlintraining]

I tend to use my CPU to do the re-encoding myself, I find my hard drive (and the SATA protocol) just isn't Turing complete and, as a result, is incapable of converting something to H.264.

A wise decision.

RPM is about access times, not about data rate.

And now you've gone retarded. Faster RPMs reduce latency, but because the sectors are also moving past the heads faster, it increases bandwidth as well. Sorry you flunked physics, man.

Movies are about shoving massive amounts of data to the drive in a linear fashion.

Thanks for that, captain obvious. We didn't know.

For that reason, and the high cost of SSD storage per gigabyte, I can't see any reason on Earth why DVRs would switch over.

I can see a very simple reason. It was the reason in my original post: It's called the They Stopped Making Them theory. It goes a little like this: You can't find them anymore, and because they're complex electromechanical devices, we can't just bang rocks together and have a 7200 RPM drive with a SATA connector plop down next to the fire.

Yes, I can do sarcasm too. Unlike you, however, I also realized that when you're writing something to disk at 20mbit/s times however many channels you want to watch, if you also want to re-encode those so you don't, say, run out of HDD space after watching a few weeks of your favorite shows, you'll need to be reading that data back off again, then doing all your "turing" operations on it, since as you so eloquently put it, your HDD isn't turing complete, and then writing it back to disk.

The PVR needs to not just write out 1 or more streams, but it also needs to be able to read it out (so you can watch stuff! Amazing!)... and while this is happening, also be able to do an encode/decode, which represents another pair of I/O streams.

Very quickly, you find that you're running out of bandwidth, and that your freshly minted computer science degree has not prepared you for this elementary realworld example. You'll then promptly core dump, catch fire, and no longer be a source of future snark for thousands of slashdotters who wasted precious minutes of their life reading your comment.

Re:Faster notebook drives.

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Areal density improvements really accentuate the characteristics that disks have always had(in addition to being cheap and huge):

As you say, the density increases mean that the speed of the head in bits/second has been growing by leaps and bounds, even as actual platter speeds haven't budged in years. And, if you throw a lovely, contiguous, read or write at an HDD, you'll see results to match. Even a lousy little consumer disk can be pretty damn fast.

Under a random I/O workload, everything collapses into seek hell, and suddenly it mostly comes down to how fast you can get the head into position(which really hasn't improved all that much and has always been a sad story).

SSD

[seifried]

SSD's are definitely the way to go for 99% of laptop users (unless you need more than say half a terabyte of space), SSD == lower power, no vibration/shock issues, and waaaay lower latency. I've been replacing all the drives in my laptops with SSDs for a few years now, I can't imagine going back to spinning rust. As for large file storage in laptops I bet a lot of users can get away with USB sticks now rather than HDs anyways. About the only place for spinning rust now is as a tape like storage medium where latency isn't an issue.

Re:SSDs are a fad

[seifried]

This is true of any storage medium. Also what happens if you laptop gets lost or stolen? Catastrophic loss of data is always just around the corner, as such you need to be making backups, ideally off site in case your home/office/data center/whatever burns down/gets flooded/clobbered by a tornado/hurricane/whatever. Bad things happen to good data, so make copies!

Re:They're free to do as they please

[Trepidity]

Sure, and people are free to complain about them. One way information is exchanged in marketplaces, which helps guide consumer decisions and price signals, is via discussion.

Linux still needs support for hybrid technology.

[WarJolt]

Ubuntu 12.10 still does not support intel smart response technolgy. Added to that UEFI still has a few issues with Linux unless you are comfort with figuring it out yourself and don't even get me started about nvidia optimus. Google bumblebee. I want to keep around 7200rpm drives just for their simplicity.

Re:SSDs are a fad

[Anonymous Coward]

And a swindle. Catastrophic failure lurks around the corner for all SSD users. Serious compotore users do not sore mission critical datas on SSDs. Period. Take the kazoo out of your mouth, Slashdort!

A global user base and a few million MTBF hours makes you wrong.

The fact that you think only SSDs suffer from critical failures makes you an idiot.

Any knowledgeable computer user doesn't store "mission critical" data on a single drive, or even in a single location. Idiots do. Running a different type of hard drive isn't going to change that. Murphy will still win.

Re:What they really mean

[cgenman]

SSD's in this laptop cut boot speed in half. This is absolutely apparent, and I'd definitely swear by it as the most effective $200 speed-up I've put into 2 computers.

Re:SSDs are a fad

[Anonymous Coward]

don't pick on him just because you can't spell commodore

Re:SSDs are a fad

[Pentium100]

Any rich computer user doesn't store "mission critical" data on a single drive, or even in a single location. Poor people do.

FTFY