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.

[squiggleslash]

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.

Re:Faster notebook drives.

[bored]

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).

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).

Re:SSDs are a fad

[rudy_wayne]

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.

Re:SSDs are a fad

[gweihir]

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!

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.

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.

Re:SSDs are a fad

[gweihir]

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

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.

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