How much have hard drives improved over the past...5 years or so?

[desura]

I have some old drives that I have the choice of either selling on ebay (or here) or just using for myself. It's a collection of early SATA drives and ATA drives.

So, how much have hard drives improved over the past five years?

 

[Baked]

Everybody is using SSD for boot/app drive now. HDD is for backup/file storage/file serving. The slowest SSD is leaps faster than the fastest HDD. It's dead silent, generates far less heat, and uses very little wattage.

 

[desura]

Everybody is using SSD for boot/app drive now. HDD is for backup/file storage/file serving. The slowest SSD is leaps faster than the fastest HDD. It's dead silent, generates far less heat, and uses very little wattage.

I'm aware of SSD tech.

But I'm just wondering about spinning disk.

Seems to me that the...advances basically come in platter density and power consumption? I mean, obviously, but it seems that some drives are 30% faster than previous generation drives which themselves were...so I'd guess maybe 50% faster over the years?

 

[smitbret]

My Samsungs and Seagates from 2008 and 2009 cruise along at 70ish MB/s with peaks about 80. My 3 new 2TB Seagates cruise at about 160MB/s and peak around 190MB/s. Oh, and they are slightly cooler than the Samsungs and Seagates in the same case.

 

[Vinwiesel]

The increase in platter density has led to an improvement in MB/s transfer speed, because more bits are read in a single revolution of the platter. However, seek times are pretty much as slow as ever. Power consumption per MB has come down, but power consumption per drive is pretty much the same, at the same RPM.

I guess it depends how you would use them. I tend to use old drives for long-term disconnected backup. The big question is if you can sell them for enough to make it worth your time.

 

[HeXen]

It's improved so much that i have a WD Velociraptor collecting dust in the garage.

 

[Nothinman]

I have some old drives that I have the choice of either selling on ebay (or here) or just using for myself. It's a collection of early SATA drives and ATA drives.

So, how much have hard drives improved over the past five years?

I would say that while the sizes have improved greatly, the reliability has dropped significantly.

 

[corkyg]

I would say that while the sizes have improved greatly, the reliability has dropped significantly.

Agree up to a point. A lot of reliability depends on how the drive is used and how big it is. For drives of 500GB or less, reliability is excellent in my experience. Once the TB threshhold is crossed, it begins to slip especially of it is filled to more than 2/3 of capacity.

 

[jiffylube1024]

Agree up to a point. A lot of reliability depends on how the drive is used and how big it is. For drives of 500GB or less, reliability is excellent in my experience. Once the TB threshhold is crossed, it begins to slip especially of it is filled to more than 2/3 of capacity.

Except the new 1tb drives like the seagate barracuda which are single-platter drives and very reliable.

The number one metric for reliability in hdds is # of platters. I try to stick to 1 or 2 platter drives as much as possible. It pays off in the long run.

 

[corkyg]

A good and valid point. I have no personal experience with 1TB 1 platter drives, but the logic is there.

 

[thelastjuju]

They are LESS reliable and MORE expensive (thanks to price fixing under the guise of a flood).

Hard drives have become more like disposable goods that die within 1-2 years.

I would hang onto all old drives, as they just don't make em like they used to.

 

[smitbret]

They are LESS reliable and MORE expensive (thanks to price fixing under the guise of a flood).

Hard drives have become more like disposable goods that die within 1-2 years.

I would hang onto all old drives, as they just don't make em like they used to.

Really, I haven't noticed much difference. They've all failed eventually. My recent HDD history:

40GB Seagate IDE from 2001
200GB WD IDE from 2005 - DEAD
250GB WD IDE from 2004
250GB WD IDE from 2005 - DEAD
300GB Samsung Spinpoint HL300LJ from 2006
300GB Seagate ST3300831SCE from 2007
500GB Samsung Spinpoint HL501LJ from 2007
1TB WD Green WDEADS from 2009
1TB Seagate 7200.12 from 2010 - DEAD
2TB WD Green WDEARS from 2011
2TB Toshiba Canvio External
3 x 2TB Seagate ST20001DM001 that are about 1 month old.

To be fair, the dead 1TB Seagate was an external that fell about 5 feet onto a concrete floor while powered on. It wouldn't power up so I pulled the drive out and used it in a Rosewill External Enclosure for temporary backup for a year until bad sectors took over and it was unreadable and unformattable.

I haven't had a drive just "fail" since my 200GB WD IDE. I've learned over time not to let the circuit board on the bottom touch anything. Mostly, though, I've learned that if you just install them and leave them alone, they will last a LONG time. My incidents of failure over the last 13 years fell in proportion to the amount of tinkering I've done.

 

[2is]

Everybody is using SSD for boot/app drive now. HDD is for backup/file storage/file serving. The slowest SSD is leaps faster than the fastest HDD. It's dead silent, generates far less heat, and uses very little wattage.

Not only is your first sentence completely false, but this entire post has absolutely nothing to do with what the OP asked.

 

[TheReaWarmonger]

They improved so much they aren't even mechanical anymore! (lulz). On that note IBM just dumped $1 billion into SSD research technology. In the next 5 years mechanical hard drives will be a thing of the past, with SSD's being much more affordable.

 

[Cerb]

They improved so much they aren't even mechanical anymore! (lulz). On that note IBM just dumped $1 billion into SSD research technology. In the next 5 years mechanical hard drives will be a thing of the past, with SSD's being much more affordable.

Maybe, but don't count your chickens, yet. NAND will need to be more cheaply produced, by an order of magnitude or more, or NAND's replacement will have to come out, and become popular enough to drop its prices very low, as well. 5 years is an awfully short time frame, and the death of HDD technology has been prophesied many times by the hopeful, only to not work out.

 

[2is]

Yeah, I don't see HDD's going away anytime soon. There are lots of cases where big capacity for cheap is more important than all out speed.

 

[mikeymikec]

I would say that while the sizes have improved greatly, the reliability has dropped significantly.

I'm not sure it has. I haven't seen a significant rise in drive failures in my line of work (usual disclaimer, I don't consider my experiences to be definitive).

@ OP - it depends on what you intend to use them for. Consider that the storage device has been (and likely always will be) the slowest part of the machine. I have a spare 320GB IDE disk which I've encrypted with Truecrypt that I connect via USB and I'm using it for backups.

I imagine second-hand hard disks sell for peanuts on ebay, I know I wouldn't try one unless I absolutely had to.

 

[It's Not Lupus]

I haven't noticed any real increases in capacity in the last couple years. I expected hard drives to be past 4-5TB by now.

 

[BFG10K]

HDDs have gotten a lot faster, especially if you include the latest 1TB VelociRaptor. Here the 3 year old 1TB Black is getting smoked by one:

In the next 5 years mechanical hard drives will be a thing of the past, with SSD's being much more affordable.

That's not going to happen. To store something like Youtube on SSD would be a horrific cost, and the content is growing every day.

3TB for 4c/GB below; you'll be lucky to reach that in ten years on an SSD. Even the new Crucial drives are still 57c/GB (14x more) while offering only one third the capacity.

 

[TheReaWarmonger]

Maybe, but don't count your chickens, yet. NAND will need to be more cheaply produced, by an order of magnitude or more, or NAND's replacement will have to come out, and become popular enough to drop its prices very low, as well. 5 years is an awfully short time frame, and the death of HDD technology has been prophesied many times by the hopeful, only to not work out.

Before there was controller, firmware, and several other bugs with a majority of the first batch of drives. Now days with all of that ironed out, indeed the only thing holding them back is the cost. Tho there is new NAND technologies out that can reduce the cost of SSD's and make them more reliable already (just not adopted yet). With how much money the corporate giant IBM just dumped into research, it'll only take a couple years for them to develop their own low cost NAND technologies. It only took three years for solid state drives to drop 66% in price-per-gb. If that happens over the next three years, drives like the $109 Samsung 840 120GB will jump down to around $72. At that price point there is no reason for owning a mechanical hard drive (unless you keep religious backups of everything). So over the course of five years, that same capacity drive could drop down to a measly $47. It wont take long for large hard drive manufactures like WD, Seagate, and others to migrate a majority of their resources to SSD's. Mechanical drives will eventually be in low demand only by server companies. Other than large storage capacity, I personally don't see a future for mechanical drives in the home or office.

 

[Cerb]

If that happens over the next three years, drives like the $109 Samsung 840 120GB will jump down to around $72.

Not even close. A 10TB will need to be $200. Neither the T nor the 10 are typos. ~10TB HDDs should be considered fairly large in 5 years, but we could have even larger. Today, a 1TB SSD would need to be $200, and 500GB $100. The new Crucial sets a nice low bar, but it's still quite a ways off.

Other than large storage capacity, I personally don't see a future for mechanical drives in the home or office.

So...what are they being used for now?

Right. Large storage capacity.

Unless SSDs can get within 150% or so of the cost of a large HDD, they will not displace HDDs. People are not willing to pay for the linear cost increase for storage capacity. HDDs offer far better value for increasing amounts of data. When that's not what's needed, SSDs have to compete on price. Most people will not pay the expense of a large SSD, and/or need more space than can be had with one, and/or will buy whatever is cheaper, not knowing or caring.

At a 50% premium, you might still need to convince folks, but 50%, with mature controllers, would end up worth it, over the long haul, for anything but a simple file server.

Yes, SSDs are faster, and yes, people like that, but that accounts for a small amount of storage sold (not an insignificant amount, by any means, just a small slice of the pie). SSDs are good enough to coexist with HDDs, and will get better, but it will take a disruptively-cheap solid state storage technology to start seriously displacing them.

 

[2is]

I'm slowly starting to convert my DVD and Blu-Ray's to M4V's on my media server for streaming to my AppleTV. I absolutely love my SSD's in my main system but there is no way I would put these files on an SSD. I currently have a 1TB drive that's close to full and I'm only just getting started. To have the capacity I need in SSD's would cost a LOT and the benefits would be none

 

[TheReaWarmonger]

Not even close. A 10TB will need to be $200. Neither the T nor the 10 are typos. ~10TB HDDs should be considered fairly large in 5 years, but we could have even larger. Today, a 1TB SSD would need to be $200, and 500GB $100. The new Crucial sets a nice low bar, but it's still quite a ways off.

So...what are they being used for now?

Right. Large storage capacity.

Unless SSDs can get within 150% or so of the cost of a large HDD, they will not displace HDDs. People are not willing to pay for the linear cost increase for storage capacity. HDDs offer far better value for increasing amounts of data. When that's not what's needed, SSDs have to compete on price. Most people will not pay the expense of a large SSD, and/or need more space than can be had with one, and/or will buy whatever is cheaper, not knowing or caring.

At a 50% premium, you might still need to convince folks, but 50%, with mature controllers, would end up worth it, over the long haul, for anything but a simple file server.

Yes, SSDs are faster, and yes, people like that, but that accounts for a small amount of storage sold (not an insignificant amount, by any means, just a small slice of the pie). SSDs are good enough to coexist with HDDs, and will get better, but it will take a disruptively-cheap solid state storage technology to start seriously displacing them.

Is this kid for real? Do you not understand english? I've never used more than 60GB of drive space in my life for everything I use. Lay that one on me big guy, especially when a large majority of us will never touch even 256GB.

 

[Sleepingforest]

Is this kid for real? Do you not understand english? I've never used more than 60GB of drive space in my life for everything I use. Lay that one on me big guy, especially when a large majority of us will never touch even 256GB.

Cerb is looking from an enthusiast/gamer's point of view, while you have more of the mom/pop machine point of view. My 256GB drive filled up the day I installed it--I'd ideally like 1TB or more for all my games and programs like Photoshop. At the same time, I recognize that some people only store documents and a few gigs of music, so 64GB or 128GB is totally feasible.

Your point of view is valid, but you also have to look at it from the OEM point of view. Most consumers can't tell the difference on a sheet of paper between SSD and HDD, even if there is some marketing. Even then, many will blindly pick the "1TB MOAR COAR" computer over the "hey, it's an SSD!" computer.

In other words, it doesn't make sense for OEMs, where most get their computers, until the SSD gets as cheap as the HDD or very close. Right now, they'd have to spend a ton on marketing to make consumers aware, just to sell a more expensive product.

 

[TheReaWarmonger]

Cerb is looking from an enthusiast/gamer's point of view, while you have more of the mom/pop machine point of view. My 256GB drive filled up the day I installed it--I'd ideally like 1TB or more for all my games and programs like Photoshop. At the same time, I recognize that some people only store documents and a few gigs of music, so 64GB or 128GB is totally feasible.

Your point of view is valid, but you also have to look at it from the OEM point of view. Most consumers can't tell the difference on a sheet of paper between SSD and HDD, even if there is some marketing. Even then, many will blindly pick the "1TB MOAR COAR" computer over the "hey, it's an SSD!" computer.

In other words, it doesn't make sense for OEMs, where most get their computers, until the SSD gets as cheap as the HDD or very close. Right now, they'd have to spend a ton on marketing to make consumers aware, just to sell a more expensive product.

I still lay my cards with IBM. Of course SSD's wont replace HDD's in the server market any time soon ($/gb is way too high), but I think a majority of OEM PC and mechanical drive manufactures will cut investments in that field in the near future. You're not making any money if you're selling only 50% of your drives to some providers. It's already happening with a majority of higher end laptops being shipped with SSD's instead of HDD's. The need for storage at a consumer level is nearing obsolete. People such I store our data on the cloud, where it will never be lost. I can stream my movies, music, and everything directly from the cloud. Why keep it locally where it has potential to be completely lost forever. The only benefit is having it on demand (e.g. no downloading required) if you wish to have it in its original virtual form. Tho even ISP's are upping the ante, with Google Fiber there really isn't much of a wait to have a file in its original state. I just don't see where people can use beyond 256GB, if their not storing music or movies on their machine. It's in fact extremely difficult to chew through that much space even installing games. That's just me, always one step ahead of the curve. I think mechanical drives need to be o-u-t out at a consumer level. If you wanna store music and movies, sure get a mechanical drive setup your own NAS. It's just the demand for them aren't going to be as great in the future (which may lead to long awaited HDD prices falling).