Comments on: Perpendicular drives hit the market

Toshiba says it's first to commercially release industrywide innovation that greatly increases the amount of data a drive can hold.

[pigonthewing]

Small is okay, but why not think big?

I want to see them use this perpendicular recording technology to squeeze terabytes onto a single 3.5" desktop drive.

Yes it's cool that you can fit 80gig in an inch and a half, because iPods and cellphones don't have room for multiple drives like desktops do, but I've already packed my tower with disks and my only option now is external storage options, which are cumbersome and slow.

Or even premiere a notebook drive that could keep a couple hundred gigs so I can carry all of my editing footage on the road without depending on a separate device to host the content.

It's a good start, but why not go for the bang? A terabyte laptop sounds way more impressive than an 80gig iPod. Because how much music do you really have on yours?

[JLBer]

My guess...

My guess is that they don't want to bring this technology to standard drives because it could decimate the SAN industry as it currently stands.

Right now, they can sell racks of storage, totalling hundreds of drives. I don't have definitive numbers, but I would assume that the returns on multiple racks + disks + controllers + switches + the rest are much greater than (for example) one rack + fewer perpendicular disks + fewer controllers + fewer switches.

Consider also the myopic nature of many managers. Having so many racks justifies paying millions of dollars for terabytes of storage. "Look at all of the hardware that we got for our money!" Now imagine condensing that same storage down from four racks to a single rack with perpendicular drives. From a technical perspective, it's the same amount of storage. From a marketing and visual perspective, I can very easily hear management saying, "But if it's only one rack, why should we pay so much?"

And anyone who thinks I'm kidding clearly has not worked in the I.T. field long enough to know any better.

Another reason is probably that the technology is bleeding edge. They probably want to "field test" it before it's released to the PC masses who want more space for their DVD rips.

Just my two cents. Convert to your currency as appropriate.