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

Re:SSDs are a fad

[Anonymous Coward]

Of the many laptop hard disks I have personally owned (Western Digital, Seagate, Hitachi and Toshiba) have all failed/are showing pre-fail signs over SMART apart from two. Those two are a 7200rpm 500GB WD Black which is a 2nd disk in my main laptop, and an ancient Hitachi IDE drive in a old laptop I no longer use. I have disassembled a dozen laptop disk drives of mine over the years to destroy the platters. I have 3 sat next to me in an anti-static bubblebag with a few bad sectors each for scratch/temporary use.

Of the SSDs I have personally owned (Kingston, Corsair, Intel, Samsung and OCZ), not one has failed or is showing problems over SMART. The only issue I have ever had was a compatibility issue between an Intel SSD 330 and the Intel SATA AHCI controller on my main laptop, where the drive would stop responding to the computer (it didn't do it on other SATA controllers).

True, it is just anecdotal evidence, but I have yet see to see a failed SSD in person.

makes sense

[smash]

Having gone from a 7200 rpm drive to a hybrid, the difference is night and day. Yes SSD is faster (i have one in another machine but the difference between plain 7200 and 5400 is nothing like the jump to hybrid. Hybrid is not much more than a regular drive.