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Seagate To Stop Making 7200rpm Laptop HDDs

Posted by Soulskill on from the mourn-the-spinning-platters dept.

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."

54 of 261 comments (clear)

  1. Faster notebook drives. by girlintraining · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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!

    --
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    1. Re:Faster notebook drives. by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    2. Re:Faster notebook drives. by squiggleslash · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

      RPM is about access times, not about data rate. Movies are about shoving massive amounts of data to the drive in a linear fashion. 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.

      --
      You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
    3. Re:Faster notebook drives. by jamesh · · Score: 2

      DVRs do not need 7200 RPM drives. 5400 RPM is plenty.

      An OTA HDTV signal is about 20mbit/s. Now the rub is, most PVRs have the option to record at least two channels simultaniously. And it later needs to be read back out, then re-encoded, and written later -- real-time encoding is very, very processor intensive if you want any kind of quality. 5400 is fine for storing. It's not good for encoding/decoding simultaniously. The other thing is, budget 5400 RPM drives have smaller buffers. Which means they're going to be a lot slower for something like video.

      I have a >5 year old PC with 2 USB DVB tuners in it running mythtv that can record 4 shows and have 4 of us watching different previously recorded shows over 802.11bgn wireless without breaking a sweat. It has a 7200RPM drive in it, obviously, but a 5400RPM drive isn't that much slower, and the PC has 2GB memory in it so there is plenty of memory for buffering anyway.

      If i want to fast forward 30 seconds to skip ads, or try and do ad detection or transcoding then it starts to hurt as the CPU just isn't up to it, but IO bandwidth really isn't a problem

    4. Re:Faster notebook drives. by bored · · Score: 4, Informative

      The sequential throughput rates for 5400 RPM hard drives are not noticeably different from 7200 rpm hard drives. At least not as much as a naive assumption of the ratio between rotational rates and a fixed areal density would make you believe (and the density isn't fixed). The big performance advantage of faster spinning harddrives is due to the reductions in rotational latency. For problems where large buffers can be sequentially filled or written between seeks (aka video) you won't notice a difference. At 20MB/sec just about any drive on the market can sustain 4+ streams if the buffers are > than a few MB. This wasn't true 10 years ago, but the increases in density have made modern 5400 RPM drives considerably faster than the 7200 or 10k drives from years past (for problems not related to seeking).

    5. Re:Faster notebook drives. by EETech1 · · Score: 2

      I'd bet that they have gotten much faster as a result of the ever increasing density of the platters as well. With the higher density drives putting bits past the heads twice as fast every time the density doubles, the additional ~40% increase in RPM is likely becoming less important, and for most people it's a better investment increasing the capacity.

    6. Re:Faster notebook drives. by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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).

    7. Re:Faster notebook drives. by SpiceWare · · Score: 2

      That's one of the benefits of switching to digital later than the US did - the specs for ATSC were published in 1995, a few years before the late 1998 release of MPEG4.
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATSC_standards
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPEG-4

      ATSC was updated in 2008 to support H.264.
      http://www.engadget.com/2008/09/22/atsc-2-0-includes-support-for-h-264/

      I've recently cut the cord and implemented a Mac mini + a couple of HD HomeRun tuners and discovered that there are H.264 broadcasts in Houston. However, they're an encrypted as it's for a pay service with a handful of channels targeting the Hispanic community.
      https://www.airbox.com

    8. Re:Faster notebook drives. by pipatron · · Score: 2

      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

      This is yet another reason why the PC platform must die, and the Commodore 64 i still the only viable option for serious computing. It may not be the fastest computer available today, but at least its storage medium is turing complete (and actually slightly faster than the computer itself).

      --
      c++; /* this makes c bigger but returns the old value */
    9. Re:Faster notebook drives. by EETech1 · · Score: 2

      It makes me wonder if it would be worth it to have a filesystem that was designed around the huge sizes of HDD's available today that would make an effort to write files as continuous blocks of data, and perhaps allow you to somehow define the approximate size of the file to automatically leave space around and even in the middle of it to be able to modify it and still minimize fragmentation. Something static like a PDF or image file could be set to not need this extra space, but if you were working on a large document you could do a "save as" or the first save the program could give you the option of defining how much space to set aside for the file, and create bins to store your documents in that would help to keep them sequential so you just skip a few deleted tracks instead of having to reposition the heads. That would help speeding up future reads and writes, and make it much easier to figure out if a particular file could go into any used space that is ready to be overwritten by knowing if what you are saving is likely to ever need more space than where you are storing it. Perhaps your image and document directories could be created in 200 MByte chunks to help speed up accessing the directories while previewing documents or flipping through your pictures as well.

      I had some audio and video programs I used to use on my older PC's that would allow you to tell the program in advance how long of a recording you were going to make so that they could prepare a space to be able to write them as continuous files. On my older PC's it made the a huge difference in the quality of recording I was able to make without the occasional stutter, and the responsiveness of the system especially while recording video. Once the drive became close to full, it might take the program 5 - 10 minutes to prepare the disk buffer, but it would not have ever had the horsepower to do it while recording.

      I remember the last XP computer I had at work. The hibernation and pagefile became very badly fragmented, and by turning them off, deleting them, defragmenting the hard drive, and forcing them to be a certain size when I recreated them, the computer was much more responsive when it started having to swap, and it cut the time to hibernation down from 3 - 4 minutes down to 20 - 30 seconds.

      Perhaps it's something the drive firmware could also do, but I think a little guidance from a competent user and some smarter software could help speed up file access times through the OS as well.

    10. Re:Faster notebook drives. by elashish14 · · Score: 3

      That is exactly how the ext2 filesystem works, my friend. Here is a good reference (from 2006) that explains the exact same idea: http://geekblog.oneandoneis2.org/index.php/2006/08/17/why_doesn_t_linux_need_defragmenting. The more advanced behaviour you suggest, I imagine would have to be taken care of at the application level.

      Of course, as soon as any hard disk reaches capacity, it becomes fragmented no matter what.

      --
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    11. Re:Faster notebook drives. by KalvinB · · Score: 2

      The thing is, the "slower" drives are plenty fast enough for Tivos and whatnot. The drive is not the limiting factor on streaming recorded HD content. It's the CPU that determines whether your digital recorder/player can do full 1080.

      http://www.zdnet.com/blog/ou/how-higher-rpm-hard-drives-rip-you-off/322

      The other issue is that faster RPMs doesn't necessarily mean better performance for your application. When dealing with large media files, it's pretty irrelevant since you're doing sequential IO the vast majority of the time.

      --
      Work Safe Porn
    12. Re:Faster notebook drives. by Jane+Q.+Public · · Score: 2

      "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."

      That is so. But unless you want to build huge buffers into your system (and in some circumstances even when you do), latency is still going to be a problem.

      It's a spinning disk. It takes time for data to spin under the head. You aren't going to change that, and faster drives are better.

      To me, this looks like a real bonehead move on the part of Seagate. Unless they know something I don't. Which is quite possible.

    13. Re:Faster notebook drives. by im_thatoneguy · · Score: 2

      An OTA HDTV signal is about 20mbit/s. Now the rub is, most PVRs have the option to record at least two channels simultaniously. And it later needs to be read back out, then re-encoded, and written later -- real-time encoding is very, very processor intensive if you want any kind of quality. 5400 is fine for storing. It's not good for encoding/decoding simultaniously. The other thing is, budget 5400 RPM drives have smaller buffers. Which means they're going to be a lot slower for something like video.

      20Mbps is 2MB per second.

      1 hour of HD video is going to be about 7GB at that bitrate. If you put a minimum amount of RAM into a PVR... like 3GB it can buffer at least 3-4 minutes of uncompressed HD video. If you assume 3 streams that's a minute long buffer for the encoder, which is more than enough for a hardware H264 encoder which can handle 2 streams simultaneously. You only really need about 1-2 seconds of buffer. 2GB for 2 streams of video would be serious overkill. You could hold most of a TV program in RAM for playback and not touch the HDD while encoding 2 streams without breaking a sweat. And since it's a sequential write a 5400rpm HDD could handle 20MBs easy. That's 10 20mbps HDTV streams.

      HDDs are not going to be a problem for a PVR.

    14. Re:Faster notebook drives. by EETech1 · · Score: 2

      Thank You, I was (obviously) not aware that's what was done on EXT2. Is that also done with any of the other Linux filesystems?

      It seems logical that leaving the extra space between files would help reduce fragmentation as the disk becomes full as well, because the more room you leave between files, the better chance you have of being able to fit a new file somewhere in one piece. You could write it near the end of the extra space to allow both files to still be modified without having to break the files into pieces. Even having to Dollie up a file into parts to fill space could be written on sequential tracks so the heads don't have to seek to read the file, just skip past the first file as it spins by.

    15. Re:Faster notebook drives. by AmiMoJo · · Score: 2

      Rotational speed isn't the only factor determining seek time. The head has to move over the disk as well, and it isn't any faster in a 7200 RPM drive. When looking at overall performance in a system having a 7200 RPM drive doesn't make that much difference, especially compared to the vast improvement seen from SSDs and hybrid drives.

      As Seagate point out it just isn't worth it any more.

      --
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    16. Re:Faster notebook drives. by Jane+Q.+Public · · Score: 2

      "Rotational speed isn't the only factor determining seek time."

      No, it isn't the only factor. But that's beside the point, since that was the factor I was referring to.

      You can change the seek time of the head. But you can't change the rotational latency. That is a fixed number.

  2. Re:SSDs are a fad by rudy_wayne · · Score: 4, Funny

    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!

    You misspelled Commodore.

  3. Mini-RAID enclosures by macraig · · Score: 2

    I predict there's going to be a few pissed manufacturers of 2.5-inch RAID enclosures.

    1. Re:Mini-RAID enclosures by macraig · · Score: 2

      Doesn't matter. Most people will buy 7200RPM drives instead of 5400RPM drives for their RAID box if they are available because the difference in price doesn't make a fart of difference. Those same people won't buy SSDs instead because their price and capacity do make a fart of difference.

  4. They're free to do as they please by e065c8515d206cb0e190 · · Score: 2

    To all the whiny complainers above: they're free to decide what they want to sell or not. As a customer, you can always choose to buy somewhere else if unhappy.

    1. Re:They're free to do as they please by Trepidity · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

      --
      10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
    2. Re:They're free to do as they please by SeaFox · · Score: 2

      To all the whiny complainers above: they're free to decide what they want to sell or not.
      As a customer, you can always choose to buy somewhere else if unhappy.

      You can say that now. But a couple more buyouts/mergers and there wont be anyone else.

    3. Re:They're free to do as they please by ultranova · · Score: 2

      To all the whiny complainers above: they're free to decide what they want to sell or not.

      No matter how much you white knight a company, it will never reward you with an orgy of sweet capital gains love. Sorry.

      --

      Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.

  5. SSD by seifried · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:SSD by Gothmolly · · Score: 2

      Why do you go through laptopS in "a few years"? What use case are you an example of?

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    2. Re:SSD by demonlapin · · Score: 2

      So does silicon. We've had the technology for SSDs for a long time, just not cheaply.

  6. Re:What they really mean by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Nah, I think what they really mean is that the market for 7200 laptop drives is gone. The middle customer, that wants good performance but decent capacity, is going to choose a hybrid drive 9 times out of 10 relative to a 7200 drive - it's significantly (and more importantly, noticeably) faster for the things that people notice (bootup, often-used programs), and the cost premium is negligible relative to 7200 drives.

    Honestly, I agree - I don't see any mass-market reason why the average person would want a 7200 drive over a hybrid drive. I can see a market for 5400 drives (cheap media storage), for hybrids (relatively cheap storage if you only have 1 hd in the laptop), and SSD's (speed), but the 7200 rpm drives really don't offer anything unique that distinguishes themselves. Maybe when hybrids were more expensive there was room, but as they keep dropping in price they're killing the 7200 market.

  7. Re:SSDs are a fad by gweihir · · Score: 5, Funny

    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!

    I agree! And the same is true for computers in general. I mean, even the Mars rover had a computer failure. And HDDs can also fail catastrophically. Who would ever use such an unreliable technologies for anything? Paper is the way to go!

    --
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  8. Re:SSDs are a fad by seifried · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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!

  9. Sad by Grayhand · · Score: 2

    5400s are 90s technology. Sad that better than a dozen years later they are going to be the only option other than SSDs. Some benchmarks haven't been increasing that much since the late 90s.

  10. Re:SSDs are a fad by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

  11. Re:SSDs are a fad by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  12. Remeber when seagate was king of hd by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    and didn't need a "director of marketing and product management" tool to justify their decisions. 15 years ago I had a bunch of seagates installed on my servers running 24x7 that lasted at least 10-12 years. In the last 5 years I had 3 seagates on a desktop bite the dust.

  13. Re:SSDs are a fad by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    But paper is highly flammable and prone to decomposition. Baked clay (or stone, if you can afford it) tablets are the way to go!

  14. Re:SSDs are a fad by gweihir · · Score: 5, Funny

    Clay? Stone? Epic fail! It breaks if you drop it! Just like a HDD! We have to carve everything into silicone foam-rubber!

    --
    Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
  15. Re: 5400s are 90s technology. by TaoPhoenix · · Score: 2

    So much for "innovation", right? And in the 90's (and I'm gonna borrow about 2 years from the next decade) we saw the ferocious increase in computer technology ranging from Mac OS System 7 and the invention of Linux and then Windows 3.11 at the beginning, to the first iteration of Mac OS X, solid contributions to Linux, and Win XP. Hardware went from a midline 40mhz with the 486 chip just getting going, to say 3.5 ghz near the end of the Pentium 4 run. Similar increases in hard drives and graphics/sound and other things. I among others was eagerly awaiting each new improvement.

    Now it's 2013, "after even the Mayan apocalypse so to speak, ", and all I got is this "we're going back to 5400 drives" tshirt from Seagate. This is Moore's Law creaking at the seams because the next killer jump in tech to be "disruptive" as the biz types like to call it, is risky as get-out, and no one's taking the chance on it yet.

    --
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  16. Re:SSDs are a fad by damn_registrars · · Score: 2

    My laptop hard drives average 1.5 years between failure. If an SSD drive dies in 5, that's a huge improvement.

    And if you stop buying Seagate drives you'll see an even bigger improvement. I buy from the other large HD manufacturer and I average at least 3-4 years on my laptop drives with my laptops running on average at least 12-16 hours per day, year round. Generally I end up replacing them due to need for more storage space before I replace them due to failure; I still have a 30gb laptop PATA drive that works fine from 2004.

    --
    Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
  17. Re:What they really mean by cgenman · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

    --
    The ______ Agenda
  18. makes sense by smash · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    --
    I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
  19. Re:What about people who want reliable & fast? by smash · · Score: 2

    The nand in hybrid drives is SLC and not MLC. SLC nand is a lot more reliable than consumer grade MLC.

    --
    I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
  20. Re:SSDs are a fad by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

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

  21. Re:SSDs are a fad by Pentium100 · · Score: 4, Insightful

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

    FTFY

  22. What's strange to me by Sycraft-fu · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Is Seagate doesn't offer any consumer SSDs. Go to your favourite retailer and look for SSDs. You'll see Intel, Samsung, Crucial, OCZ, Corsair, and so on including a bunch of brands you've probably never heard of. What you won't see is Seagate. They do make SSDs, but only enterprise level drives, the kind of stuff that someone like Dell buys and rebrands to sell to you for servers.

    So what the fuck do they think they are going to do here? If they keep on the current track, they are in for a major shrink in business. There is a growing market for SSDs in the consumer arena, but they are not going to buy high priced SAS SSDs designed for heavy write loads.

    It really surprised me how completely HDD manufacturers seem to have missed the boat on SSDs. They'd be natural companies for people to buy from, already known names in storage, but they've been really pokey. Seagate only does enterprise stuff, WD tried a consumer drive for a bit but it was over priced and underperforming and they've cut it.

    They have a limited time to sort this shit out and get a good lineup of consumer and enterprise SSDs, or they'll find themselves being squeezed out of the market by all the new players.

  23. Re:What they really mean by theedgeofoblivious · · Score: 2, Informative

    Seagate bought Maxtor.

  24. Re:SSDs are a fad by PlusFiveTroll · · Score: 2

    I had a client hit his notebook while running. The ceramic platters in the HDD shattered. The Intel and Samsung SSDs I've used so far are all working (knock on wood). I've seen a few OCZs of other peoples die rather randomly though.

    All things die. Professionals backup.

  25. Re:SSDs are a fad by AK+Marc · · Score: 2

    Poor people don't have any computer. Most people don't have much "data", so a $5 to $20 USB drive can hold everything they need to store. Poor people don't store mission critical data on a single drive, they store it in the cloud from the free computers they use at the library, if they get a chance to between their three minimum wage jobs.

    "Poor people don't drive a Ferrari, they drive a Ford" ignores the fact that many people are too poor to own anything. But I do keep multiple copies of my mission critical data on media less than 1% of the cost of the computer (usually free USB drives gifted from vendors and such).

    --
    Learn to love Alaska
  26. Re:SSDs are a fad by Miamicanes · · Score: 2

    > writes fail, but your data is accessible

    Bullshit. Just TRY recovering data from an OCZ Vertex or Agility 2 drive that decided to spontaneously bork itself. If you're LUCKY, the drive won't interpret dd_rescue as a hack attack, and brick itself into "Panic Mode" as a countermeasure, and "all" you'll have to do to "fix" the drive is run "secure format" to wipe the drive clean and start over again.

  27. Re:SSDs are a fad by AK+Marc · · Score: 2

    SSD is vastly more relaible than spinning discs., so "poor" people would likely stick to USB sticks (which I've seen make it through a clothes washer and come out working on the other end). Ever hear of a spinning disc surviving that? They are simple and easy, ubiquitous, and will likely be supported for 20+ years (with plenty of warning when end of life is coming). Why would anyone consider anything else?

    "Poor" here apparently means "wants more than he can afford".

    --
    Learn to love Alaska
  28. Re: 5400s are 90s technology. by AmiMoJo · · Score: 2

    What really surprises me is how HDD manufacturers have largely ignored SSDs. There are a few hybrid drives but you don't see Hitachi, Seagate or Western Digital SSDs in modern laptops. Currently only mid to high end models have SSDs, but in a few years it seems likely that Samsung and people like Hynix will be the biggest suppliers of laptop storage. A few years after that desktops will go the same way, and Seagate will become the next Kodak.

    --
    const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
    SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
  29. Re:SSDs are a fad by damnbunni · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Amusingly enough, my Commodore does store its data on an SSD.

    Well, sort of. It's Flash, at least. My Commodore 128D has a two gig SD card that it sees as a hard drive.

    Partly because getting that set up was cheaper than buying a bunch of blank 5 1/4" diskettes these days.

  30. Re:So who will do it then? by gnasher719 · · Score: 2

    There are currently more manufacturers of 3.5" Floppy drives, than of Harddisks. There's 3 left. Count them WD, Seagate, and Toshiba.

    That was initially surprising, but the reason is probably that there is zero development cost involved with 3.5" Floppy drives. They can use the same machines to build them ten years from now if there is any demand. With a hard drive, try selling a current hard drive two years from now, not a chance against the competition. So staying in the HD business is expensive.

  31. Re:Hybrid drives? by Rog7 · · Score: 2

    Try one. They work well. Until SSDs get cheaper, hybrid drives are a great solution on a price / performance standpoint.

  32. How much cheapper do you want them to get. by ralphaostrander · · Score: 2

    Put one 70 dollar ssd fry's electronics, put your OS on it, put your cache on it. Your data on the old one. You do not need a big ssd. Watch your system fly.