No advancements in HDD's?

T

Trackr

[H]ard|Gawd
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Feb 10, 2011
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I've been looking off and on for an external drive for some back-up.

It's been over half a year, and there still isn't anything larger than 2TB and nothing under 12.5mm for 2TB at 2.5", and nothing over 4TB for 3.5".

Is it just around the corner?
 
Well, with most hard drives being manufactured by two companies now, get ready for less innovation and advancements. That's just the way it works and I think you are expecting a little too much.

I wouldn't count on 3TB 2.5" or 5TB 3.5" drives soon.
 
There's also not a huge demand for drives any bigger, or even this size. How many people do you know that would use even 1TB? The average consumer wouldn't use even close, let alone 4TB.
 
after that dancing atom video many have concluded that a new storage solution is around the corner

just gotta play the waiting game for now :(
 
I think for now 3-4TB is decent for a single drive, what I'd personally like to see is better reliability. Drive QC has gone to crap in the past years. No way would I ever put anything on just a single hard drive these days. Raid or bust. With backups. But even data I can afford to lose, I only do raid.

I'm actually still mostly on 1TB drives at home, 8 of them in raid 5. I can quadruple my space simply by replacing with 4TB drives. At least in theory, doubt my current server supports drives larger than 2TB.
 
timta2 said:
Well, with most hard drives being manufactured by two companies now, get ready for less innovation and advancements. That's just the way it works and I think you are expecting a little too much.

I wouldn't count on 3TB 2.5" or 5TB 3.5" drives soon.
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Damn.. so much for Moore's law, huh?

Aesma said:
You asked the same question not even 2 months ago : http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1751091
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Thank you for the time benchmark..?

Jesse B said:
There's also not a huge demand for drives any bigger, or even this size. How many people do you know that would use even 1TB? The average consumer wouldn't use even close, let alone 4TB.
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Maybe not for 5TB 3.5" drives, but what about 2.5TB+ 2.5" drives or slimmer 2TB 2.5" drives?

Red Squirrel said:
I think for now 3-4TB is decent for a single drive, what I'd personally like to see is better reliability. Drive QC has gone to crap in the past years. No way would I ever put anything on just a single hard drive these days. Raid or bust. With backups. But even data I can afford to lose, I only do raid.

I'm actually still mostly on 1TB drives at home, 8 of them in raid 5. I can quadruple my space simply by replacing with 4TB drives. At least in theory, doubt my current server supports drives larger than 2TB.
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Yes, I have the same thing. 8 drives in RAID 5.

But that's at home, and I need more than 2TB for my photography while on the road.

Problem is, I can't carry a huge 3.5" drive plus charger, so I'm stuck with 2TB exactly..
 
Less competitors , stagnation , no consumer level drive for larger storage sizes (this sub forum makes up a tiny fraction of overall users that require larger than 500GB HDDs). Hell if you buy a 4TB drive you better have a UEFI bios mobo otherwise you'll have to split that sucker in two (baring some form of partitioning that I'm not aware of) , MOST people simply do not have the kind of space requirements we do and most people are not concerned with data loss either. I agree that reliability has taken a nose dive but that is what happens when you do not have a healthy market full of competitors , corners get cut to maximize profit which is point of capitalism. The good news is that data requirements for businesses are greater than ever and larger sizes MUST be made to keep market flowing , we can't survive on 4TB drives for long if we want businesses to keep up with demand of a growing population.

Not to mention technological stalls , getting through the next "barrier" is going to more difficult than it was to move from 5-10GB HDDs to hundreds of GB's to multi-terabyte drives. Its being worked on and there will be a solution but don't expect it anytime soon.
 
Jesse B said:
Moore's Law has nothing to do with Hard Drives, it's related to the transistor count in integrated circuits.
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There is a similar law that applies to hard disks. Something like "doubles in size every second year" or so. Google on it if you want to know the exact details.


The reason we see no advancements is because there are only two large companies left now, and they cooperate. The thailand floodings were just an excuse to uphold the prices on hdd. Western Digital and Seagete posted huge profits during the fake "flooding crisis":
http://news.softpedia.com/news/HDD-...Western-Digital-Post-Big-Profits-266676.shtml

Are we yet at the same price point as before the flooding? I doubt it. We will see advancements when SSD will challenge HDDs, in storage capacity. Until then, these two companies have no reason to release new HDDs. Sure, in their labs they have new tech, but they are in no hurry to release those disks to us. Why would they? They earn huge amounts of money no matter what. We customers have no choice. There is no competition since 2 years back, when the third HDD company was bought. When SSDs challenge the HDDs, we will see rapid advancements again.

This monopoly situation is against the law, and the government should look at this. Earlier the performance/price ratio was totally different than now. The graphs looks different. That is evidence of cooperation and monopoly situation. The same will happen if Intel buys AMD, of course.
 
brutalizer said:
There is a similar law that applies to hard disks. Something like "doubles in size every second year" or so. Google on it if you want to know the exact details.


The reason we see no advancements is because there are only two large companies left now, and they cooperate. The thailand floodings were just an excuse to uphold the prices on hdd. Western Digital and Seagete posted huge profits during the fake "flooding crisis":
http://news.softpedia.com/news/HDD-...Western-Digital-Post-Big-Profits-266676.shtml

Are we yet at the same price point as before the flooding? I doubt it. We will see advancements when SSD will challenge HDDs, in storage capacity. Until then, these two companies have no reason to release new HDDs. Sure, in their labs they have new tech, but they are in no hurry to release those disks to us. Why would they? They earn huge amounts of money no matter what. We customers have no choice. There is no competition since 2 years back, when the third HDD company was bought. When SSDs challenge the HDDs, we will see rapid advancements again.

This monopoly situation is against the law, and the government should look at this. Earlier the performance/price ratio was totally different than now. The graphs looks different. That is evidence of cooperation and monopoly situation. The same will happen if Intel buys AMD, of course.
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It's sad it's that way and it paints a picture of how technology is not about advancement, it's about money. It's the same deal going on with processors right now, and lot of other products.

If the SSD technology hits a point where big space can be achieved cheaply and have no write limitation at all, now HDDs will really be forced to release newer tech, or at least lower their prices.
 
Jesse B said:
There's also not a huge demand for drives any bigger, or even this size. How many people do you know that would use even 1TB? The average consumer wouldn't use even close, let alone 4TB.
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uhm, yes there is. in the data center there is even more demand. if i could buy 6TB drives tomorrow I would buy a few hundred.
 
Well average customers are using cloud services.

Red Squirrel said:
If the SSD technology hits a point where big space can be achieved cheaply and have no write limitation at all, now HDDs will really be forced to release newer tech, or at least lower their prices.
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Don't worry, SSDs aren't going that way, each new shrink brings better capacity/price NAND, but at the cost of reliability/write endurance. Something new will need to be invented to surpass HDDs.
 
According to some WD slides a while back they were planning on selling 5 TB HDDs by the end of the year.
 
Aesma said:
Well average customers are using cloud services.



Don't worry, SSDs aren't going that way, each new shrink brings better capacity/price NAND, but at the cost of reliability/write endurance. Something new will need to be invented to surpass HDDs.
Click to expand...

Yeah that's what I've been reading too. Sure, the numbers are HUGE and typical use is like 10 years, but the fact that there is a limit is still a problem for anyone who wants to use it heavily such as VMs and stuff or extreme high IO situations where tons of data is written and deleted every day.

So yeah definitely a new technology will be in order I guess. The IBM atom stuff is definitely interesting. Though IBM is bad for making stuff very proprietary so if they were to come up with it chances are they'd patent it and it would only be available by them and only work in their servers/systems.
 
Seeings as how 1 TB platters came out recently I would think 5TB drives aren't far away.
 
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