2.5" the future industry standard?

[Ben90]

Hey guys, pretty much just hypothesizing about building a new case from the ground up and had everything all drawn out, well i was wondering what you guys think are going to happen to the 3.5" drives since pretty much all SSDs are 2.5" (except the upcoming OCZ Colossus).

because if when SSDs completely take over the market i think it would be kinda stupid to have random legacy 3.5" bays taking up space in the case; so just wondering what you guys think will happen to 3.5" in like 5-10 years

 

[alcoholbob]

The 3.5" form factor is a legacy from eons ago and predates current hard drive technology so there'd have to be some compelling reason to simply ditch the legacy support of so much existing hardware.

 

[Idontcare]

Originally posted by: Ben90
just wondering what you guys think will happen to 3.5" in like 5-10 years

The same thing that has happened to 5.25" in the past 5-10yrs...nothing.

I do expect more and more case suppliers to ship 3.5" -> 2.5" adaptor brackets with their cases though in the coming year or two for the same reasons the power supply folks used to ship their PSU's with extra 4-pin molex -> Sata power dongles during the few years we transitioned to primarily sata powered drives.

Other than that I don't expect much in the way of evolution with desktop cases.

 

[n7]

I am hoping so.

 

[aka1nas]

Originally posted by: Idontcare

Originally posted by: Ben90
just wondering what you guys think will happen to 3.5" in like 5-10 years

The same thing that has happened to 5.25" in the past 5-10yrs...nothing.

I do expect more and more case suppliers to ship 3.5" -> 2.5" adaptor brackets with their cases though in the coming year or two for the same reasons the power supply folks used to ship their PSU's with extra 4-pin molex -> Sata power dongles during the few years we transitioned to primarily sata powered drives.

Other than that I don't expect much in the way of evolution with desktop cases.

I'd expect that nicer aftermarket cases will have a 2.5-inch bay or two in the next few years as well. Market penetration of SSDs is still too low, but once the prices drop enough they will be common enough to warrant this.

 

[CSMR]

I don't think SSDs will completely take over by then.
If something like Moore's law holds for them:
Now $250 for 80Gb, $50 for 16Gb extrapolating.
Assuming that for dominance of SSDs people will need a cost of $50 and need 500Gb now, 50% more space every 2 years, SSDs grow by 100% every 2 years for same cost ("Moore's law")
2 Log[1000/80]/Log[2/1.5] years = about 13 years
But that assumes how much storage people need grows slowly. If it keeps up with Moore's law then SSDs will never take over unless they are cheaper than HDDs.
The 2.5" HDD is more of a threat to the 3.5" format.

 

[taltamir]

notice that intels 32nm process cut their cost AND SIZE in half, yet reduced our cost from 310$ to 230$. not from 310$ to 155$. Competition is the issue here, and with more competition and ramping up of production prices can go way waaaaay down...

I expect colossus like SSDs to be the norm in a few years. 3.3 inch drives with more chips, rather than 2.5 drives with less. the reason it started with 2.5 drives is that SSD hold a HEAT and POWER advantage... even today many say that SSDs are extremely valuable for laptops but not for desktops. where 2.5 inch spindle drives have piss poor performance.
But as SSD increase their margin of quality over spindle drives, they WILL become a desktop standard, and desktop oriented SSDs will begin appearing...

Also... think of price... intel is selling the 32nm drives as an upgrade over the 50nm... but what if a competitor packed a bunch of 90nm chips into a 3.5 bay? Not as much performance right NOW, but two years from now when the cutting edge is 22nm and used and paid for 50nm chips are dirt chip but of low density, you could buy 50 x 50nm chips to pack into 3.5 bay for a cheap massive desktop storage that is less expensive then a top of the line 10 x 22nm 2.5 / 1.8 inch drive.

 

[CSMR]

You're taking price measurements at different points in the cycles, comparing 45nm at the end of a cycle to 32nm prices at the beginning. If you measured at the same points in the cycles (i.e. approx 2 year gap) you'd get very different results. You've just shown that the instantaneous costs of the highest-tech firm doesn't determine the market price. That doesn't mean that the technology of firms as a whole doesn't determine the price. Prices will reflect a zero-profit condition for a level of technology between the most advanced firm and the marginal firm (taking account quality diversification), both approximated by Moore's law over time.

But even if intel started pricing so low as to make no profit, which is not going to happen, it wouldn't hugely impact the price. Pricing over time would be changed by a constant factor: I'd guess between 0.7 and 0.9; profit margins are not that high with solid state memory. The price today would need to go down by 95% for them to take over mechanical drives for all uses now.

The fact that you can use fabs operating at older process sizes, I don't see how that argues for a higher rate of change in price. That's not something you can only do in the future, you can always do that. I don't even think the number of old fabs will affect current prices that much, it will just change how many new fabs you build.

 

[taltamir]

i am comparing it in different companies though. I am saying if more companies competed at the low end. while the high end will remain in the hands of intel.