Hard drives as backup devices...

[Jeff7181]

Back in the mid 90's I remember buying a 12 GB Quantum Bigfoot drive. It was the largest IDE drive available at the time, but it wasn't even close to being the fastest. There were 7200 RPM drives showing up at the time I believe, and this was a 4000 RPM drive IIRC. 5400 RPM drives were mainstream. It was slow as molases in January, but it had a lot of space.

My question is, why can't we have drives like that now?

Why doesn't a company manufacture HUGE but slow drives to use as backup devices. It's my understanding that if they decrease the spindle speed, it's A LOT easier to increase the data density. So... what's stopping someone from making a 4000 RPM (or maybe even 3200 RPM), 2 MB cache (or maybe even 1 MB), 1 TB hard drive? No demand? Or does the spindle speed not allow for THAT much of an increase in data density?

I don't know about you... but I think it would be nice to be able to buy a hard drive with high capacity that's slow to use for backups, or just storing huge amounts of data that you don't use often. I don't need 50 MB/s average data transfer rates and 8ms access times for a drive ONLY used to backup data I can't afford to lose. I can't justify spending $200 for a drive to backup my data, and have no room for when I accumulate more data that I need to back up. I could justify $200 for say, a 500 GB backup drive... or $300 for a 1 TB backup drive... something like that.

 

[soulflyfan]

i cant remember who makes them, but you can buy 400GB IDE drives now. if thats not enough, with the ease of home raid arrays and mutiple HDD setups, theres not much need to make em slow and big, when you can have fast and big. also, as with most "old and goo" things that arent made anymore, theres probebly no economical reason for a company to produce them

 

[Zepper]

I think Maxtor makes a slow 300 GB 5400 rpm drive ($230.), but its cost per GB is quite high unless you can find a rebate deal on it. Not big enough fer ya??? The Hitachi 400 GB is 7200 rpm but has been around $400. very high per GB and is made of unobtainium... I think the Hitachi 250 is the biggest that's near the price per GB sweet spot
.bh.

 

[Fulcrum]

I'll bet it's a cost issue in desktop form factor drives. If you can build and sell a 7200rpm drive for very close to the same cost as a 5400rpm drive, then why not drop the 5400rpm line and build only 7200rpm, thus enjoying greater economy of scale on the 7200rpm line, which only makes the cost gap even narrower. Not to mention the fact that the overwhemling majority of the market wants 7200rpm models, not 5400rpm ones. It's just basic economics, I suppose. Case in point, why pay $226 for this, when for $243 you can get this? The choice the average user is probably going to make is clear, even if they do have to buy a $30 sata controller as well. If this is true for 5400rpm vs 7200rpm, how much less would demand probably be for an even slower spindle speed drive. Even the larger capacity on a theoretical 3600rpm drive wouldn't be much of an issue, as just about anyone who really needs that much storage goes raid, and besides, most of them also need speed as well.

 

[sparks]

There isn't a real need for one. Enterprise users would never go for such a device and there isn't enough demand for it on the consumer level. No hard drive manufacturer would waste the resources of a manufacturing line to produce such a device. With the low volume and the dis-economy of scale, the cost would be exorbitant.

 

[Jeff7181]

Originally posted by: Zepper
I think Maxtor makes a slow 300 GB 5400 rpm drive ($230.), but its cost per GB is quite high unless you can find a rebate deal on it. Not big enough fer ya??? The Hitachi 400 GB is 7200 rpm but has been around $400. very high per GB and is made of unobtainium... I think the Hitachi 250 is the biggest that's near the price per GB sweet spot
.bh.

That's exactly my point... I don't want to pay $1 per GB for the size AND speed of that drive. I don't want to have to have a buttload of smaller drives that are more reasonably priced in RAID to get the storage capacity I want.