Comments on: A divide over the future of hard drives

Room temperatures should derail the current line of disk drive development soon, so changes are coming.

[Des Alba]

Spinning drives on the way out

Solid state, non-spinning storage media is the way of the future. Seagate and Hitachi would be well-advised to recognize this trend and plan accordingly. In another 7-10 years spinning HDD will have gone the way of the 8-inch floppy disk.

[pj-mckay]

Hows that?

I can buy a 200Gb disk for £60 or 1GB for £30.

Static memory devices have a long way to go to catch up with the advantages of hard disks at the moment.

And don't forget that HDs already have built in redundancy in the way of spare sectors per track, spare tracks to replace faulty ones, plus the ability to reformat and ignore bad areas. Add this to the cost per Gb and they're still way ahead in my book.

Of coure thay're far more susceptible to damage in motion etc, so I would expect to see most personal gadgets to go static mem. Not in my PC just yet though.

[Fictia]

I wonder if any of these technologies will be fault-tolerant

Meaning, I'd rather buy a 400GB harddrive that is only 200GB mirrored internally than have to mirror two separate 200GB harddrives myself. Once a half drive of the 400GB goes bad, though, you could retire it for non-critical tasks such as external storage etc.

In other words ... how do you RAID a laptop harddrive today...? You can't (easily)!

[Jakesty]

Fault tollerance

I think the biggest problem is with moving parts and the best way to get rid of that is flash rom. It might be limited now in its compacity, but I can buy a 4 gb SD card for like $60 or so. If you had the size of a 2.5 inch bay to store memory in flash I think you'd be in the range of 100gb or more all without moving parts.
Heck, if you want a "plan b" have the user carry a 2gb USB stick with a stripped down WINXP install. Then make sure the system can boot USB. At least on the road the laptop wouldn't be useless because of a hard drive failure.
Jake

[tonyspencer2]

I'll wait

Heating particles? This sounds even dodgier than the DeathStar
which is the only HD I've ever had fail on me.

Think I'll wait for it to prove itself mature first...

[kovacsbv]

Why not 5-1/4" media?

The access may be slower, but for movies written sequentially or on a defragged drive it seems like it would work. There's plenty of 5-1/4" bays out there for CD/DVD. It seems this would help stave off technology issues too.

[peacebyjesus.com]

For speed-Why not flash/HD combo

If speed were the only problem, why not write to flash which then would write to the HD. Of course, God willing it appears with lasers speed may be greatly increased anyway. (http://news.com.com/Laser+innovation+speeds+up+hard+disks/2100-1008_3-6194970.html?tag=nefd.top).

If this is the case, wouldn't liquid cooled type cases may be needed or helpful?

[peacebyjesus.com]

For speed-Why not flash/HD combo

If speed were the only problem, why not write to flash which then would write to the HD. Of course, God willing it appears with lasers speed may be greatly increased anyway. (http://news.com.com/Laser+innovation+speeds+up+hard+disks/2100-1008_3-6194970.html?tag=nefd.top).

If this is the case, wouldn't liquid cooled type cases be needed or helpful?

[possumdelight]

Who would have thought that "no more shrinkage" would be a problem?

- C