A Look Into The Hard Drive's Future : Where Does The HDD Go?
Source: Tom's Hardware – Keywords: hard, drive, future
Where Does The HDD Go?
The good ol’ hard drive is a controversial component. On one hand, it has shown impressive capacity increases that lead to the current 1.5 terabyte capacities (see Seagate announcement). On the other hand, performance hasn’t increased at the same rate as those capacity boosts. As a result, hard drives are still the slowest core components of any modern computer.
In addition, the hard drive market is highly competitive and in a constant change of flux, with new recording technologies, capacity, and performance on the one side and cost pressure along with emerging storage alternatives, such as flash memory squeezing on the other. We wanted to have a closer look at the hard drive arena and enlisted the help of Hitachi to do so.
Hard Drive Market Segments
The market is not as easy to assess as you might imagine, because there are multiple players that all focus on different product types. These can be primarily characterized through different form factors, most notably the 3.5,” 2.5,” and 1.8” sizes, as well as others. However, these form factors do not necessarily equate to a particular market segment. While the HDD market is divided into at least four segments—server/workstation, desktop, mobile, and consumer electronics—it is not possible to strictly assign each form factor to one of these segments. For example, there are 2.5” drives for notebooks, but there are also 2.5” models for servers. In addition, hard drive makers do not all cater to the same segments and form factors, but portfolios vary a lot.
Trends: Upswing for 2.5” Drives
The trend towards smaller form factors started many years ago when 5.25” hard drives were phased out in favor of the 3.5” ones, which were much easier to handle, faster and more robust. Higher recording capacities helped to bridge potential capacity gaps as a result of this move, since smaller platters store less data at comparable areal densities.
Today, the trend continues in favor of 2.5” hard drives for multiple reasons. The enterprise segment benefits from 2.5” server hard drives due to their much improved performance per watt and better I/O performance. Mobile computers, which still show the strongest growth worldwide, require lightweight and compact hard drive solutions. Finally, capacity isn’t an issue anymore today because of further increased recording density, and a plethora of interface options allowing users to add storage capacity as needed.
Threats to the HDD
Smaller hard drive form factors such as 1.8,” 1.3,” and 1.0” are still controversial. While we believe that 1.8” drives will remain an important segment for ultra portable computers and consumer devices, the smaller form factors at 1.3” and 1.0” face increasing pressure from flash-based drives. For starters, cost per capacity improves faster on flash products than on compact hard drive solutions. At the same time, the enterprise segment is also turning to flash SSDs, as high-performance versions easily outperform any mechanical drive.
The hard drive will not disappear any time soon, but the hard drive makers have to focus on the areas where flash memory cannot beat mechanical drives: cost per capacity when it comes to high storage capacities on 3.5” hard drives for the desktop; consumer and near-line enterprise storage; and cost for performance level in enterprise storage.
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Interesting article, thanks!
Although didn't really understand this:
SSD's..that's where it's at..bring it on!
traditional HD's will be for uber storage..but not for current computing, imo. (i.e. local storage)
cheers,
goozaymunanos
p.s. stuff and nonsense: http://www.eupeople.net/forum
They didn't even mention the pending switch from 512byte sectors to 4Kbyte sectors which will greatly increase the capacity of drives (because they can optimise their layout!)
I agree SSD's are where it'll be, the sooner they get them out to the masses the cheaper they'll become and the sooner we'll get larger capicities.
Traditional mechanical HD's will be around for a while yet, but will I ever be buying a Terabyte drive, I doubt it, it just takles to damn long to format, I currently have a Western Digital 320GB drive, partitioned 4 ways, the largest being 180GB for Windows XP and that took ages to format.
I'd rather add more "smaller" HDs and with ever increasing SATA sockets on mobos it is possible to add multiple drives, plus your data is much safer from hardware failure and viruses.
The only real need for larger capacity drives for the consumer now is for uses in laptop's, PVR's and such like where it is not possible to addc more than one drive.
Mark
I'd have to disagree on some of the points impy makes above, notably on the issues of energy consumption and noise and reliability.
but the two F1's are heading into a NAS RAID enclosure in the near future.
Energy consumption and noise (and as a product of that - thermal dissipation) are very important to me and as far as i can see for my purposes, the fewer harddrives the better.
As for reliability, if you have two harddrives instead of one, you're twice as likely to have a hard-drive fail, but obviously you'll only lose half as much data, although i have to say, in 15 years of 'power-computing' ive never had a disk die on me beyond recovery.
Incidently I have two samsung spinpoint 250GB in a mirrored RAID totally filled by OS and page file, I have two 750GB spinpont F1's for long term storage - pictures and hd video. Yes I know thats 4 HDD's
Interesting article, thanks!Although didn't really understand this:
Pretty clear I would say!! Manufacturers have mainly produced >= 7,200rpm 3.5" HDs in recent times. As aerial density has increased dramatically drives can go back to spinning a bit slower without sacrificing too much performance.
Please don't overlook the feat of engineering required to produce HDs to the required tolerance levels. Modern drives are just as much as a technological marvel as GPU's, etc.!!
Great article thanks guys!! More of the same please!!
Bob
Yeh I understood what they were getting at. It was just the use english that confused me a bit
"much better performance with only a little trade-off in performance."
It sounds like it should be a trade off in something else... like 'efficiency'. If I'm just being stupid nevermind
maybe trade off in noise, heat or power usage?
maybe trade off in noise, heat or power usage?
Yes any/all of the above would make more sense.
"...the largest being 180GB for Windows XP and that took ages to format"
This is the fault of the filesystem, not the drive itself - NTFS is notorious for taking ages to format. Extent-based filesystems like JFS and XFS will format a 1TB drive in a few seconds.
Not all of us require storage capacities in the terrabytes realm.
Performance is far more important to some of us, which is why Raptors etc have done so well, and the second gen SSD's will start to eat chunks out of the HDD market.
I'm working @ Western Digital Media Operation here in 'Silicon Valley', Malaysia.. Basically we produce disk so that means WD produce their own disk just like Seagate.. It has been a year since WD took over Komag USA, the independent disk maker.. September 05, 2008 if i'm not mistaken so right now we're celebrating the 1st anniversary.. I'm not sure why the author didn't get the accurate info.. WD right now are producing everything on their own.. In 2.5" sectors, WD are no matched with even Seagate as they're more into cheaper 3.5" and that certainly reduced their revenue.. 320GB per-platter which has more density and lower fly height right now only produced by WD.. Hence we can see 320GB n 2 platters 640GB are only offered by WD with very awesome price point.. Stiil yet to mention 10k RPM 300GB Gamers' n Enthusiasts' VelociRaptor.. The future looks very bright for WD while Seagate admitting the year 2008 is not for them..
September 05, 2008.. I'm sorry.. 2007 actually
I really don't know why SSDs are still getting dismissed. 128GB SSDs are now under £250. That's enough storage for a lot of home users without a second mechanical Hard Drive.
Why WD continue to deveope the Raptor in the face of SSDs is, frankly, ridiculous. Its price/performance ratio is abysmal (I never bothered with it on my gaming rig - its just unjustifiable) so its only appeal can be to the "price is no object" crowd. Well SSDs has it beat - it's dead technology.
Regards,
Eduin
ive gotta agree with Eduin about the Raptor, but i disagree about 128GB being enough for a home user, my dad isnt exactly computer savvy and his 120GB laptop drive isnt big enough for him... my own computer has 2x 320GB drives in raid 0, and 2 seperate 320GB drives one for OS and one for docs, the raid is games, hd movies and HDD heavy apps.
A little look on an online retailers shop showed me that I can get an OCZ 250GB SSD with a Read speed of up to 170MB/sec and a write speed of up to 98MB/sec and a seek time of 0.2 - 0.3ms. Now that’s much better than all hard disks on the market, just look at the seek times. At the moment something like that will cost you £500 but then most high end CPU’s and GPU’s cost you about that anyway so really whats stopping things from progressing further. How long will it take for that £500 SSD to become more affordable by most gamers?
Really 250GB’s would be more than enough to cope for all my OS/Software/Game installs and all you would need is a normal driver for all your files in the background. I would pay about £200 for that drive, so how long will it really take for SSD to appeal to gamers. I don’t think it will be as long as toms hardware is saying.