WTF is up with HD manufactures?

[The Grim Ninja]

[quote hal]why on earth would you expect them to be able to improve so quickly? DO they suddenly get ideas that didn't exist a year ago?

Uhm.. yes, they do. That's how it works. And at this point, most of these ideas should have already been developed years ago and just been made technologically feasible through progresses in technology. Such as higher data density on platters due to more sophisticated production machinery. If you don't innovate, you become irrelevant.

Do you see a 3Ghz G5 tower anywhere?

[hal]

you can't expect rates of progress to continue at a constant rate. eventually there will be diminishing returns. we're seeing that now.

[lafinfil]

[quote MacMagus]Data-density is up. It's just manifesting in the 2.5-inch drive market right now.
Manifest Density ?

: -)

[Carthaigh]

[quote space-time]what's "redundant" in such a drive? the motor that spins the platters is dead: all data is lost. The logic board is dead; all data is lost. The case is not sealed anymore and dust gets in: all data is lost. To have a truly redundant drive, you need two drives packaged together. That is 2 sealed compartments, 2 motors, 2 separate reading arms/heads, 2 logic boards, 2 interfaces. It's like having 2 drives attached together with duct tape. I see no point in such a setup.
Uh uh. Pretty much the only way to lose data due to a hard drive failure is when the read/write head crashes into the drive platter (the most common hard drive failure). If anything else goes wrong, the drive platters can be put into a good mechanism and recovered.

We were talking about the WD 640GB drives which have 2 320GB platters and two read/write heads. If the drive was set up as "two drives" in a RAID1 configuration, if you had one head crash you could still recover all your data from the other platter.

[space-time]

[quote Carthaigh]
Uh uh. Pretty much the only way to lose data due to a hard drive failure is when the read/write head crashes into the drive platter (the most common hard drive failure). If anything else goes wrong, the drive platters can be put into a good mechanism and recovered.

We were talking about the WD 640GB drives which have 2 320GB platters and two read/write heads. If the drive was set up as "two drives" in a RAID1 configuration, if you had one head crash you could still recover all your data from the other platter.
I see. I still think having 2 separate drive is better. When the drive fails, you don't want to waste time to send the drive to a data recover service to move the platters into a good mechanism to recover your data. That will take days (weeks?) and $$$$. You want your data the next day. For that you need a separate drive. Just my humble opinion.

[The UnDoug]

2 heads are better than one.


I really do think that as we move into a time of all photos and videos being digital, people are going to start losing their precious memories more and more often.

A good business model for a small business would be providing back up solutions for individuals (not necessarily even businesses--just regular folks) for like $300 or less.

It'd be pretty easy, I'd think, to convince people that they *really* don't want to lose all their memories.

[laarree]

[quote The Grim Ninja]Jan 5th 2007 - Hitachi breaks 1TB hard drive barrier
http://www.engadget.com/2007/01/05/hitac...th-7k1000/

Now, here we are, 17 months later. 1TB drives are still the largest available desktop hard drive. 17 months! Doesn't it seem like we should be hitting 3TB by now? They have 2 platter 640GB HDs, the 1TB drives were 4 platter, shouldn't we at least have 1.3TB now? ...
I'm getting rather impatient...
On the other hand, 1TB and 750GB drives are much cheaper than they were in early
2007. That's progress of a sort.

[sekker]

Come on, who here has need for more than 1TB of storage on most computers?

I care because I have my home media center, and so far almost my entire collection fits on a 1 TB Drive (plus 1TB backup). That includes years and years of our home star trek, bab5, etc, collection.

On the other hand, I have already purchased a 320GB laptop drive, and once they hit 500GB, I'll be purchasing that, too.

Until there is a real use for these bigger drives, the technology development is going to start with the biggest obvious market.

[ztirffritz]

Every time that someone says "Who needs X xB of storage in their home/business?" another hard drive screams in agony as it hits its capacity limit. I remember seeing 80Gb drives and thinking NO ONE will EVER fill that. I now have more than 1TB of storage in my home. My point is that while the storage capacity has increased, the size of the files relative to the capacity has not change much relative to the capacity. We're just storing more files, not smaller files. If you lost 10GB of music from CDs that you ripped it would suck to be sure, but that would likely take a weekend or two to reproduce from the original CDs. I have 40GB of music, 5-10 GB of photos, 400+GB of video. That would take months to reproduce what *could* be reproduced, but the photos are unique, and priceless. My time is worth more than the cost of another drive. The photos DEFINITELY are worth more than a drive.

People won't have archives of photos to sort through when they die anymore. It will be sad in a way.

[Lux Interior]

[quote ztirffritz]
People won't have archives of photos to sort through when they die anymore. It will be sad in a way.
I hope I don't run into any of these dead people looking through their old photos.