1 TB drives have been out for a good year now yet no news about any advancement (capacity/speed) in hard drives lately. Have we reached the limit at 1 tb as we have with cd-rom speeds? If not, it would be nice to see higher capacity drives come out to help drive current prices of 750gb and 1TB drives down. 500gb drives still are the sweet spot at ~$100.
Have we hit a barrier in hard drive capacity?
- Thread starter jtvang125
- Start date
I don't think so, as the race to the TB level drive was artificially sped up. Think about it, if you are close, and produce a small amount of pricey drives that give your whole brand a better image you'll do it. The important thing to watch here is the price per GB steadily coming down as capacity continues to exponentially. We just skipped a bit on the graph and things are leveling back out in the long term. The marketing difference between 750GB and 1TB is MUCH greater than 1TB and 1.25TB.
Shrinking hard drives is getting difficult, and approaching some physical limits (as in, the laws of physics,) but Seagate's "perpendicular recording" tech let them squeeze more out of it. It's probably more a matter of marketability... the big OEMs (Dell, Gateway, etc) and their average joe customers have no use for high storage capacity right now. Only enthusiasts know how to fill a TB hard drive, and it takes a concentrated effort to do so.
At the moment, the technology has outpaced users' ability to utilize it. You could say supply is higher than demand. When The Next Big Thing comes along, there will be a market for the next technology. Right now, the biggest sellers are still 40-80GB drives for Playstations and Xboxes, and computer OEMs offer the 160-320 range - and only that high simply because the drives are so cheap to manufacture now.
edit: mmm, grammar
At the moment, the technology has outpaced users' ability to utilize it. You could say supply is higher than demand. When The Next Big Thing comes along, there will be a market for the next technology. Right now, the biggest sellers are still 40-80GB drives for Playstations and Xboxes, and computer OEMs offer the 160-320 range - and only that high simply because the drives are so cheap to manufacture now.
edit: mmm, grammar
At the same time Samsung shipped the HD103UJ, they announced a 1.5TB drive at a press conference somewhere... S. Korea, I think it was.
So to answer your question, no - hard drive capacities are still going up. Eventually we will move past them, into the realm of flash-based storage, holographic storage, and all that jazz, but for now we still have our ever-growing hard drives to use.
So to answer your question, no - hard drive capacities are still going up. Eventually we will move past them, into the realm of flash-based storage, holographic storage, and all that jazz, but for now we still have our ever-growing hard drives to use.
There's also a 1.6TB drive selling at the end of the year, flash based. It'll be far too expensive for most businesses though, forget end users.
taltamir
Lifer
- Mar 21, 2004
- 13,576
- 6
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i see the transition to flash like the transition to LCDs... for a few years you will have high prices, lower quality (speed of HDD / visual quality in LCD) and smaller sizes (screensize / HDD size)...
Its a necessary technological transition, but it is gonna be slow and painful. For a while the high end will remain magnetic drives, just like CRTs remained the high end for a little while.. but development effectively stopped after a while...
it doesn't help that high capacity drives are a nitch market. most people I know only use 20-30GB...
I filled over a TB... but very VERY few people do that. It doesn't take a concentrated effort, it just takes a library of disk images and video files. A very modest one at that.
Most people don't even understand the CONCEPT of a disk image... and prefer DVDs to x264 files. So they have no use for that much space
Its a necessary technological transition, but it is gonna be slow and painful. For a while the high end will remain magnetic drives, just like CRTs remained the high end for a little while.. but development effectively stopped after a while...
it doesn't help that high capacity drives are a nitch market. most people I know only use 20-30GB...
I filled over a TB... but very VERY few people do that. It doesn't take a concentrated effort, it just takes a library of disk images and video files. A very modest one at that.
Most people don't even understand the CONCEPT of a disk image... and prefer DVDs to x264 files. So they have no use for that much space
HDDs need to keep growing in order to continue to exist. Flash drives have alot going for them.
WD and Samsung now have 320gb platters. A year ago, they only had ~160gb platters (perhaps a few had around ~200mb). They're doubling the capacity pretty much on an annual basis.
Prior to these new 320gb platters, yes, things had stagnated since last spring/summer.
WD and Samsung now have 320gb platters. A year ago, they only had ~160gb platters (perhaps a few had around ~200mb). They're doubling the capacity pretty much on an annual basis.
Prior to these new 320gb platters, yes, things had stagnated since last spring/summer.
HD DVRs is a good example of a new push. What codec(s) do they use?
For the sake of argument, let's say they record into the same formats BluRay discs do, and say we fill an entire 50gb disc for 2.0 hours of material. A 1.0TB hard drive will hold 40 hours, which is pretty standard for their advertised capacities. Factor in that TV broadcasts don't include Extras, multiple language and commentary tracks, etc, and we're up to 50+ hours. Not bad at all!
They'll push forward eventually... the storage companies got caught up in the last size war and are taking a breather to collect some profits.
For the sake of argument, let's say they record into the same formats BluRay discs do, and say we fill an entire 50gb disc for 2.0 hours of material. A 1.0TB hard drive will hold 40 hours, which is pretty standard for their advertised capacities. Factor in that TV broadcasts don't include Extras, multiple language and commentary tracks, etc, and we're up to 50+ hours. Not bad at all!
They'll push forward eventually... the storage companies got caught up in the last size war and are taking a breather to collect some profits.
Larger drives are always welcomed by me for storage. I do need a 1 TB drive, but I am waiting for the price to drop below $200. However, for all practical purposes I think less than 250 GB for a OS/Applications drive is sufficient. I run a 150 GB Raptor drive for Vista, programs, and games which holds everything I need. The rest goes on a 750 GB drive. I could foresee setups with a SSD for your main stuff with a magnetic drive for storage as an interim before the technology switches to SSD.
32-bit xp might have some problems, when they pass the 2TB border. Other systems have support for gpt partitions, so they can grow very large
Controllers and OSes have been patched several times in the past, and will again eventually. (512MB and 60GB stick out in my mind)
A quick glance shows FAT32 maxing out at 8 TB. NTFS can be extended to 2^64 byes = 16,000,000 TB, (not a typo!) though the current implementation in WinXP is "only" 2^48 bytes = 256 TB. It should take us another ~10 years to reach that, at which point, god help you if you're still running XP
A quick glance shows FAT32 maxing out at 8 TB. NTFS can be extended to 2^64 byes = 16,000,000 TB, (not a typo!) though the current implementation in WinXP is "only" 2^48 bytes = 256 TB. It should take us another ~10 years to reach that, at which point, god help you if you're still running XP
file system limitations can always be fixed by making multiple partitions. But the current 32-bit xp cannot partition beyond 2 TB
I forgot to check Linux... EXT3 tops out at 16 TB, and EXT4 is already planned, with a new top end of 1,048,576 TB. That's a lot of porn
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ext3#Size_limits
Followed from a giant table here (very long) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_file_systems
For Unix mainframes, it looks like FreeBSD and Solaris have gone considerably larger than this for years already; 2^64 and sometimes higher.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ext3#Size_limits
Followed from a giant table here (very long) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_file_systems
For Unix mainframes, it looks like FreeBSD and Solaris have gone considerably larger than this for years already; 2^64 and sometimes higher.
Samsung's Spinpoint F1 uses 3 x 334GB platters, and they're coming out with a double-platter 640GB drive and a single-platter 320GB drive. The 500 and 750GB models still use the old 250GB platters though.
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