Bigger hard drives coming?

yagga

Anyone have any dirt on new hard drives or ones in the works? We've had 1tb drives out for more than a year now. I'd like to know if anyone can tell me of any soon to be released drives, or what the drive manufacturers plans are for the year.

Thrax

1tb is the cap for a while.

kryyst

They are working on some new technology, but it's about 5 years away. For now 1tb is the cap and any new advances are just making it more stable and cheaper. Right now most companies are focusing solid state drives, larger and cheaper and thats the way things are heading.

Leonardo

1tb is the cap for a while

Maybe, maybe not. I think it's only the cap until the manufacturers sense enough competition to lower prices. When that happens, 1TB will be today's 500GB in price and the new enormous volume drives will be out at the premium prices. It may take a while. I'm seeing 500GB drives at retail now for the same price or higher than they were a year ago. Demand is still very high for the upper end drives. I don't think the HDD makers have a lot of incentive to increase drive capacity at the moment. Rest assured though, that they all have contingency plans - if not the technology and running prototypes, to launch whenever they think the market is ripe.

It's going to be a couple years before SSD can seriously compete with HDD. Sure, theoretically SSD is the future, and will probably be in reality also. But hard disk drives just keep getting better and better. Who cares if they are 'old' technology. They are inexpensive - when it burns out, just replace it with another relatively cheap disk drive.

Snarkasm

But then again, why do that when you can get a drive that will never burn out? At that point, it becomes an economics problem. Will it fail often enough that you'll be out less money buying an SSD now?

I don't know. But to some people, just the security of no more mechanical drive failures might be worth a monetary value, too.

yagga

Thrax wrote:

1tb is the cap for a while.

I kind of have to agree with Thrax, although I really don't want to. I'd like to get a couple 750-1000gb drives, but I may have to settle for a couple 500s. I think my last maxtor 250 is starting to die. Its had a few lockup issues when searching through it the last 2 days, no lost files yet, though.

On a side thought, I am quite intrigued about new ssd advances. I am quite ancy about something "new" coming to the scene. In fact, I would even probably try something like the I-ram, if only there were an updated DDR2 version coming. I value the speed and quietness too, you know.

Leonardo

But to some people, just the security of no more mechanical drive failures might be worth a monetary value, too.

Of course, but there's that troublesome little financial dynamic called cash flow. I'll take a 500GB drive now for $99 that will last five years over a 60GB SSD drive for $300 that will last forever.

Would you purchase a Celeron 1GHz CPU that would last forever...for $500? It's a matter of pricepoint. When the perceived value of SSD translates to demand, and that intersects at the correct manufacturer pricing, then we'll be talking mainstream. SSD will get there, I'll just let the earlier adopters pay for the technology and the ramp up of volume production of memory. I'll buy when prices are mainstream. I can wait. Mechanical-optical hard drives are just a great value at present. SSD is not.

Snarkasm

Oh I know, Leo, I'm just trying to show that there are a couple other ways to look at it. I was looking at it more for when drive sizes start matching each other; would you rather buy a 500 gig HDD for $50 or a 500 gig SSD for $1k (I'm pretending we're in the future where the SSD might have actually gotten to 500-gig capacities)? Sure, the $50 is hella cheap compared to the $1k, but do the benefits outweigh the cost to you, and does quiet/low temp/lower failure rates have a monetary value to you? You may never (and God knows in all likelihood you should never) ruin enough HDDs for the cost to balance out, so you have to put a monetary value on other factors.

Leonardo

The reliability quotient for me is nearly irrelevant. I keep full system backups on, you guessed it, an inexpensive external drive. That's better data security than the best quality, fail-proof drive of any kind that you could put inside a computer case. Oh, I should also add, the external backup is unplugged except when backups are being run.

But yes, I understand your point as well. Assuming storage volume equivalency, prices between HDD and SDD would need to be within 25% for me to consider SDD.

kryyst

The issue is that we are talking today vs tomorrow. Today SSD drives are good for limited applications and anything over 32gb is now priced impractically for most people, really anything over 16gb is pretty much over priced. Revisit this situation in 5 years. For mass volume I still predict regular HD's will be the contender at 1tb sized drives. However in laptops and most personal computers your primary 'work' drives are doing to be SSD, or at least in a situation where SSD is an option.

Personally I think it'll take less time then 5 years to be able to get SSD drives in the 200gb range where it's affordable. But it'll be about 5 years before it's common place for most people. Laptops though are going to be there much sooner. I mean the new Mac's are already coming with the option of going HD or SSD. The SSD's cost more and are at 64gb.