5.25" Bigfoot drives

[greenhawk]

Nope, for the simple reason that 3.5" drives offer more storage than 2.5"s ever could. The 5.25" Bigfoot was created as a cost saving line (lower rpm, etc.) while offering about the same amount of storage.

At the time a friend was buying a new system ('97 i think), the bigfoot offered 50% more capacity for the same price of the existing drives on offer.

in todays terms, I think people would still look at getting 5TB drives for the price of a 3TB green, or a 6TB for the price of a 4TB.

There could still be a possible market for them.

Though IIRC the bigfoots where still only a 1/2 height 5 1/4" unit, so a full 5 1/4 bay design should get to 10tb without issues I would think.

I can only dream. That way, 15 years later we can sit back and smile at the 10TB bigfoot2s.

 

[know of fence]

Access times shouldn't matter at all for a secondary storage drive, yet an increased radius proportionally increases maximum read/write speed. Twice the radius, twice the speed.
It the short term this means that 2.5" drives will go away first, but the future may very well hold bigger sizes, unless of course there is some quirk, like impossible to deal with vibration that bigger platters bring with it.

 

[cbn]

Though IIRC the bigfoots where still only a 1/2 height 5 1/4" unit, so a full 5 1/4 bay design should get to 10tb without issues I would think.

If two 5.25" HDD drives could fit in one full sized 5.25" bay, I think that would open up some interesting possibilities with certain inexpensive SFF cases and Mini-ITX boards.

However, based on my reading so far on drives in general, the major thing that concerns me is the URE spec. Current URE spec for most common HDD is 10^14 (WD RE drives have 10^15). As HDD capacity gets larger apparently the URE spec of 10^14 becomes more and more of a problem.

 

[hans007]

Access times shouldn't matter at all for a secondary storage drive, yet an increased radius proportionally increases maximum read/write speed. Twice the radius, twice the speed.
It the short term this means that 2.5" drives will go away first, but the future may very well hold bigger sizes, unless of course there is some quirk, like impossible to deal with vibration that bigger platters bring with it.

i think honestly they might be an even more viable item today actually. they didn't have hybrid SSD drives in the late 90s.

so i could imagine a half height 5.25" bigfoot, with today's aereal densities. if it ran at 3600RPM the average throughput really wouldn't be much worse (larger radius of disc means the outer part of the disc is moving just as fast as a 5400rpm drive ).

so with say a 32MB cache and 4-8GB SSD cache . a 4TB drive these days is a 4 platter drive, and hitachi has even shipped a 5 platter drives. so lets say its a 4 platter drive with 5" platters could have 70% more per disk. i guess you could have a 6-7TB drive.

 

[Gunbuster]

I'll pass on the 10TB 4200RPM platter drive that takes 48 hours to format or 72 hours to complete a diagnostic.

 

[Fred B]

Think the bigfoot are real outstanding in terms of longelife , this more a personel experince but al my ide disk 3.2 GB/ 20 GB / 80 GB are dead and only the bigfoot 2.1GB is alive . Not that they have been muched used lately , but doing nothing for years can be just as bad as wearing them out .

Think there is a sweetspot for building drives around 3.5 and 2.5 , to smal and it becomes a microdrive that is to slow and to big it becomes a bigfoot that wil be much more expensive to build. It would be nice to see somekind of hybride bigfoot with flash inside.