Multi-head hard drives?

[x509]

3,5" is a form factor. PCIe has plenty of connectors and cables and drives will definitely stay 2,5"/3,5".

Not necessarily! When drives got smaller historically, system builders took advantage of that to build smaller, lighter systems. This was the history when drive manufacturers introduced hard drives of 8" size, then 5.25", and so forth. Certainly with SSDs or even HDDs, why not a 1.8" form factor, once the capacity and price are where the OEMs need them to be?

Check this out. https://www.google.com/search?q=1.8...drive&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&tbm=shop

 

[Aesma]

For SSDs you have smaller, M.2, with PCIe connection. For hard drives I doubt 1,8" will grow.

 

[x509]

For SSDs you have smaller, M.2, with PCIe connection. For hard drives I doubt 1,8" will grow.

And it's only a matter of time before the "classic" 2.5" drive bay just disappears from laptops in favor of M.2 or something else At some point in time, the "drive bay" may become a slot, of the kind we have today for flash memory cards.

And the only remaining disk drive maker in the world will be called WesternSeaTachi

 

[justinjja]

Had it not been for SSD's this might have stood a small chance.

Reliability could actually be improved by having a 2nd head,
assuming the head fails the right way, and the firmware is aware of the failure.

 

[westrock2000]

I buy tons of hard drives. I don't even look at the performance numbers anymore. They're plenty fast enough, even the slowest ones (in 3TB and 4TB sizes), for storage. Anything that requires speed is on SSDs.

They still will always suffer from small multiple accesses. Even though I only use mass storage mostly for my video files, you can see that glaring speed difference when you try to update the metadata (tags) on a movie file. Sure it can stream the file just fine and it can transfer the file just fine. But updating just parts of that file remind us of the old days and what we use to have to deal with on a regular basis.

Try updating the metadata in a batch of a dozen movies and it takes a little while, compared to updating a hundred songs on an SSD and it blows through it in a several seconds.

I agree with you that it's within reasonable expectations. But it would be nice if there was a way to fix this. Dual heads would be a way to address this, but it would add cost and size for something that most people really couldn't care less about. Windows Updates on a platter drive are THE WORST though.

 

[x509]

They still will always suffer from small multiple accesses. Even though I only use mass storage mostly for my video files, you can see that glaring speed difference when you try to update the metadata (tags) on a movie file. ...

Try updating the metadata in a batch of a dozen movies and it takes a little while,

Why not RAID HDDs in this situation?