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5.25" Bigfoot drives

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lagokc

Senior member
With SSDs taking up a larger portion of the consumer harddrive market every year and harddrive manufacturers focusing more on the network attached storage where seek times aren't quite as important who else would buy an 8-10TB 5.25" 4200-5200rpm drive?

At the moment capacity is the only factor keeping SSDs from overtaking HDDs completely. I'm sure data centers would love to see maintenance costs go down by cutting the total number of drives in half.
 
If they were reliable and affordable, I'd buy a couple for my digital image and video storage and backup.
It's going to be a long time before affordable SSD's in the capacity I'd be interested in.
 
I assume your thread title was intended to be generic, because, Quantum Bigfoot drives existed and went away in the mid 1990s. Quantum was acquired and likewaise faded away as well. Your notion of a larger drive has a lot of appeal for some.
 
corkyg said:
I assume your thread title was intended to be generic, because, Quantum Bigfoot drives existed and went away in the mid 1990s. Quantum was acquired and likewaise faded away as well. Your notion of a larger drive has a lot of appeal for some.
Click to expand...

I was trying to evoke some nostalgia. Quantum's harddrive business was acquired by Maxtor which was gobbled up by Seagate so in theory Seagate should have access to the Bigfoot name. But if they cared about that they would bring back the "Quantum Fireball" 😎
 
Since we're talking nostalgia, how much capacity would a 5 1/4" FULL height drive have to have to make it worthwhile?
 
Smaller hard drives run cooler and are quieter. I suspect that, if anything, we'll see the demise of 3.5" drives at some point.

In the enterprise we've seen a gradual shift toward 2.5" drives, which can pack more spindles into a given space and require less cooling.

For the datacenter offering cheap storage I imagine that whatever is cheapest per TB will dominate. The number of drives makes little difference. Cooling is a major cost in a datacenter, so bigger, hotter drives are more expensive to operate.

Consumer PCs are getting smaller and quieter, so they too benefit from the smaller, quieter drives.
 
Ahahahahaha, yes bring back my Quantum Bigfoots. I think mine still works.

Would buy a modern one in an instant to store my RAW photos.
 
IIRC, weren't 5.25" drives only recently deceased when they decided to come out with the Bigfoot? They probably had leftover tooling and factory capacity, so saw it as a way to utilize it to produce a cheap storage product. We may see something similar once 3.5" drives are all but gone.
 
while it would be nice to see them comming back for raw bulk storage (still faster than tape or most other things), but I do not see many wanting it outside of external storage (cases are getting smaller after all).

What I would like is something similar to a 3.5" drive, but double or tripple height. One motor and current drive design has the centre shaft secured at both ends so length should not be a huge issue. With doubling the height and slowing the rotation (green drive speed) a double drive should be close to tripple capactity. Might get close to 5 times once you get to a three high drive.

just an idea 🙂
 
dbcooper1 said:
Since we're talking nostalgia, how much capacity would a 5 1/4" FULL height drive have to have to make it worthwhile?
Click to expand...

Well a 5.25" diameter circle has 2.25x as much surface area as a 3.5" circle so subtracting the center somewhere around twice the capacity. Whether or not doubling the capacity at a slight performance penalty is worth it I don't know. But sequential transfer rates shouldn't be much lower because the angular velocity of a larger disc is higher at a given rpm.
 
Carson Dyle said:
Consumer PCs are getting smaller and quieter, so they too benefit from the smaller, quieter drives.
Click to expand...

Consumer PCs are also shifting over to SSDs. Even 2.5" harddrives are too big for a tablet/most Chromebooks and 1.8" hdds are nearly extinct. A 5.25" HDD wouldn't be for inside a PC itself, it would be for your network attached storage.
 
^ For tablets, HDDs aren't too big, HDDs are too fragile. Just like in cell phones, it's simply not an option, because they will get destroyed on a regular basis. For Chrombooks, it's typically cost, as they are often using 8GB and 16GB embedded flash.

SSDs being cheap enough, however, does make them no-brainers, 95% of the time, and I wish more companies than Apple would make them standard (surprisingly, I see lots of Acers with them--maybe Acer is trying to shift away from their old image of being cheap crap...?). Users don't know they want an SSD, until they get forced to pay for one, and then have it explained to them why everyone else's PCs feel so slow, later on. With <$90 120GB SSDs every day, that shift can't happen fast enough, especially with most people already being used to using external drives for their big stuff.
 
What in the world for? As others have pointed out, even the 3.5 inch format may be not long for this world. In fact to a certain extent, the 3.5 inch drive is today's bigfoot. Back in the day, you could have a smaller, higher performance drive for OS and programs and a bigfoot for a lot of storage for a cheap price. So how many of us here have SSD's in the range of 128 GB for OS and programs and one or more 3.5 inch drives for lots of storage?

See? Nothing has changed and the market has already provided today's "bigfoot" drives in the form of continued availability of 3.5 inch drives.

Take a look on New Egg and you will find 4 TB disk drives for as low as $165 and 2 TB drives for as low as $88. Historically that is dirt cheap per GB.
 
Carson Dyle said:
Smaller hard drives run cooler and are quieter. I suspect that, if anything, we'll see the demise of 3.5" drives at some point.

In the enterprise we've seen a gradual shift toward 2.5" drives, which can pack more spindles into a given space and require less cooling.

For the datacenter offering cheap storage I imagine that whatever is cheapest per TB will dominate. The number of drives makes little difference. Cooling is a major cost in a datacenter, so bigger, hotter drives are more expensive to operate.

Consumer PCs are getting smaller and quieter, so they too benefit from the smaller, quieter drives.
Click to expand...

2.5" Disk Shelves like some of NetApps' FAS offerings are that way in a bid for more IOPS. The transition is recommended as a middle-tier of caching, mostly for customers with highly different VDI deployments that produce a lot of non-similar data. This was mostly because SSD's were too expensive to be considered practical.

It's not uncommon for a deployment to have a half or full shelf of SSD's (12 or 12 3.5" drives), a shelf or 2 of 10K 2.5" drives, and then the majority of data on 3.5" SATA shelves.

3.5" is still going very strong. 2.5" with its lower storage density, is really just being leveraged as a middle tier until SSD pricing is stronger. In the future, I'm certain that most deployments will be based on a ratio of 3.5" shelves with SSD shelves, with data demand driving the ratio.
 
Ratman6161 said:
What in the world for? As others have pointed out, even the 3.5 inch format may be not long for this world. In fact to a certain extent, the 3.5 inch drive is today's bigfoot. Back in the day, you could have a smaller, higher performance drive for OS and programs and a bigfoot for a lot of storage for a cheap price. So how many of us here have SSD's in the range of 128 GB for OS and programs and one or more 3.5 inch drives for lots of storage?
Click to expand...
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.
 
Ratman6161 said:
What in the world for? As others have pointed out, even the 3.5 inch format may be not long for this world. In fact to a certain extent, the 3.5 inch drive is today's bigfoot. Back in the day, you could have a smaller, higher performance drive for OS and programs and a bigfoot for a lot of storage for a cheap price. So how many of us here have SSD's in the range of 128 GB for OS and programs and one or more 3.5 inch drives for lots of storage?

See? Nothing has changed and the market has already provided today's "bigfoot" drives in the form of continued availability of 3.5 inch drives.

Take a look on New Egg and you will find 4 TB disk drives for as low as $165 and 2 TB drives for as low as $88. Historically that is dirt cheap per GB.
Click to expand...

The trouble is every year SSDs take more of the "good enough for average person" capacity. You can get a 960GB SSD for $450 today. The HDD's strength is in providing a lot of capacity for not that much money. Going to 5.25" drives would play to this strength.

Where would this be useful? The "give us more capacity and we will find a way to fill it" market.

1) servers who cache their data on smaller faster drives so the performance penalty is mostly hidden
2) 4k camcorders are $2000 now which is in reach of the home market. At 110GB per hour of footage, even those 4TB drives will fill up quickly.
 
Why do some file cabinets have four drawers instead of two? To hold more stuff, that's why.
Sure, SSD's are great, but how long is it going to be before they have 4-6G SSD's for data storage? Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see 4G SSD's for $200, but I don't think that's going to happen for quite some time.
For most people, 1 TB of storage may be plenty, but, as mentioned earlier in the thread, if you are a serious photographer or videographer, you can fill up a 3-4TB in no time. If you back up your valuable work, as you should, you will need three or four times the storage capacity of your data.
I love my SSD system drives and the 1TB WD RE drives are great "work" drives, but for storage, it's all 2-4TB drives. If I could afford it, I'd buy another 4TB drive this afternoon.
 
lagokc said:
The trouble is every year SSDs take more of the "good enough for average person" capacity. You can get a 960GB SSD for $450 today. The HDD's strength is in providing a lot of capacity for not that much money. Going to 5.25" drives would play to this strength.

Where would this be useful? The "give us more capacity and we will find a way to fill it" market.

1) servers who cache their data on smaller faster drives so the performance penalty is mostly hidden
2) 4k camcorders are $2000 now which is in reach of the home market. At 110GB per hour of footage, even those 4TB drives will fill up quickly.
Click to expand...

People creating that type of output need some high end disk array not some novelty bigfoot NAS box. 110 gigs per hour is enormous, could a regular NAS even handle that bandwidth?
 
Carson Dyle said:
IIRC, weren't 5.25" drives only recently deceased when they decided to come out with the Bigfoot? They probably had leftover tooling and factory capacity, so saw it as a way to utilize it to produce a cheap storage product. We may see something similar once 3.5" drives are all but gone.
Click to expand...

acutally they weren't. quantum just did it to get a competitive advantage.


i was working that summer at an OEM assembling / repairing HP pavilions, and I remember we would install the bigfoot in mostly K6-2/300-350 range machines and the first gen PPGA celerons, like the celeron 366 range.

I think at the time, disk density had not increased in a while, so it was th eonly way to make a 8-12GB ish drive cheap. those things weighed a ton, and only spun at 3600rpm or so. But yeah I think the platters in theory have around double the area of a 3.5" disk.


that said, the thing that kills drives is strain on the motor. a 5.25" disk weighs more than a 3.5 or 2.5 " one, which in turn strains the motor more into failing. thats why it spins slower too for motor life. I would guess there probably just isn't enough demand these days. back then was when video was first becoming pretty common place (1998 ish era) and 8-10GB really wasnt THAT much storage. these days, if you made a say 8TB 5.25" 3600 rpm drive, it'd be for a much smaller segment of the market that would really demand that much in one drive.
 
StinkyPinky said:
People creating that type of output need some high end disk array not some novelty bigfoot NAS box. 110 gigs per hour is enormous, could a regular NAS even handle that bandwidth?
Click to expand...

110GB/hour is only 31MB/s. This is still well in the capability range of single core ARM-based 1Ghz+ SOC based NAS' units.

If it was random data, that'd be alot more difficult. But on sequentially written data on constantly refreshed hard drives? Anything in the $150+ budget 2-bay NAS sector should be able to keep up with that.
 
Big, cheap, reliable -- I'd buy one to store all my movies and media. 🙂

It'd have to be somehow better or simply much more affordable than your average 3.5" drive to make it a success...
 
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