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Why are current hard drives so slow!

Serradifalco

Serradifalco

Senior member
My hard drive seems to be a bottleneck in my system. My cpu and ram are lightening quick and my hard drive just chugs along. When is hard drive technology going to catch up!

Don't get me wrong my current system is very fast. I can run a virus scan and Ad-aware scan at the same time and still lose no perfromance surfing the net or whatever. My hard drive seems to be the hardest working and slowest part of my system.

I would like to know what your hard drive is doing to your system.
 
hard drives have been a bottleneck for years, hybrid drives and ssd's will help but they have there own trade offs (ssd's have much faster seek times and random writes, but slower sequential read/writes).
 
Hard drives are the slowest part of the system but I consider the Seagate 7200.10 drives to be plenty fast. Next best thing to a Raptor if you cant afford a Raptor. Just my two coppers.
 
I guess two Raptors in RAID 0 would be the fastest.

Maybe the loudest, I don't know. I don't like sounds coming out of my machine so...
 
Don't you just feel hard drives should be about half the size and twice as fast by now. I have owned all varities of WD, Seagate, and Maxtor hard drives and have never really been impressed by any of them.
 
Originally posted by: Serradifalco
Don't you just feel hard drives should be about half the size and twice as fast by now. I have owned all varities of WD, Seagate, and Maxtor hard drives and have never really been impressed by any of them.
Click to expand...
I'm personally seeing terrabyte drives at the same size of my old 120G drive...that's a little more than half.

I had an IBM LVD drive about 8 or 10 years ago. It was a 4G. By today's standards, it would be quaint to average for performance, but back then it was lightning. I only spent the additional humongous amount of money on it because hard drives have always been the biggest bottleneck of any computer system...and probably will continue that way for years to come.
 
Originally posted by: Slugbait
Originally posted by: Serradifalco
Don't you just feel hard drives should be about half the size and twice as fast by now. I have owned all varities of WD, Seagate, and Maxtor hard drives and have never really been impressed by any of them.
Click to expand...
I'm personally seeing terrabyte drives at the same size of my old 120G drive...that's a little more than half.

I had an IBM LVD drive about 8 or 10 years ago. It was a 4G. By today's standards, it would be quaint to average for performance, but back then it was lightning. I only spent the additional humongous amount of money on it because hard drives have always been the biggest bottleneck of any computer system...and probably will continue that way for years to come.
Click to expand...


Compare cpu speed or ram speed from 10 years ago to now and the difference is dramatic. Do the same comparison for hard drives and the difference is far from dramatic.
 
I would say it was very dramatic. Everyone had midnight sales at the end of 1995 when windows 95 was introduced. Most stores had bundle deals with a 120 megabyte hard drive. Most people had 40 to 80 meg at the time. You can now buy a 500 gig for around 100 dollars. Chips are not mechanical, disks are. If companies like IBM and Seagate had not come up with new magnetic principals we would not be this far. I still have 1 gig drives that I paid 1300 for heck I have 40 meg AT drives in the garage that I paid 1100 for. If automobile horsepower grew at the same rate you would only be able to drive them on the Daytona salt flats in idle.
 
Originally posted by: Serradifalco
Originally posted by: Slugbait
Originally posted by: Serradifalco
Don't you just feel hard drives should be about half the size and twice as fast by now. I have owned all varities of WD, Seagate, and Maxtor hard drives and have never really been impressed by any of them.
Click to expand...
I'm personally seeing terrabyte drives at the same size of my old 120G drive...that's a little more than half.

I had an IBM LVD drive about 8 or 10 years ago. It was a 4G. By today's standards, it would be quaint to average for performance, but back then it was lightning. I only spent the additional humongous amount of money on it because hard drives have always been the biggest bottleneck of any computer system...and probably will continue that way for years to come.
Click to expand...


Compare cpu speed or ram speed from 10 years ago to now and the difference is dramatic. Do the same comparison for hard drives and the difference is far from dramatic.
Click to expand...

Compare storage size now to ten years ago and the difference is VERY dramatic.

Consumers demand more space so that is where the majority of the R&D goes.
 
I remember having a drive with a whooping 3mb/s burst transfer rate, which was the triple of my friends because I had a special harddrive controller installed.
 
If you want the fast speeds, then you wants to spend the money. 2.5" Enterprise SAS drives. Now start auctioning off the kids.
 
Originally posted by: PurdueRy
Originally posted by: Serradifalco
Originally posted by: Slugbait
Originally posted by: Serradifalco
Don't you just feel hard drives should be about half the size and twice as fast by now. I have owned all varities of WD, Seagate, and Maxtor hard drives and have never really been impressed by any of them.
Click to expand...
I'm personally seeing terrabyte drives at the same size of my old 120G drive...that's a little more than half.

I had an IBM LVD drive about 8 or 10 years ago. It was a 4G. By today's standards, it would be quaint to average for performance, but back then it was lightning. I only spent the additional humongous amount of money on it because hard drives have always been the biggest bottleneck of any computer system...and probably will continue that way for years to come.
Click to expand...


Compare cpu speed or ram speed from 10 years ago to now and the difference is dramatic. Do the same comparison for hard drives and the difference is far from dramatic.
Click to expand...

Compare storage size now to ten years ago and the difference is VERY dramatic.

Consumers demand more space so that is where the majority of the R&D goes.
Click to expand...

I'd rather have less size and more speed. That is why they make storage drives.

 
Originally posted by: Serradifalco
<div class="FTQUOTE"><begin quote>Originally posted by: PurdueRy
<div class="FTQUOTE"><begin quote>Originally posted by: Serradifalco
<div class="FTQUOTE"><begin quote>Originally posted by: Slugbait
<div class="FTQUOTE"><begin quote>Originally posted by: Serradifalco
Don't you just feel hard drives should be about half the size and twice as fast by now. I have owned all varities of WD, Seagate, and Maxtor hard drives and have never really been impressed by any of them.</end quote></div>
I'm personally seeing terrabyte drives at the same size of my old 120G drive...that's a little more than half.

I had an IBM LVD drive about 8 or 10 years ago. It was a 4G. By today's standards, it would be quaint to average for performance, but back then it was lightning. I only spent the additional humongous amount of money on it because hard drives have always been the biggest bottleneck of any computer system...and probably will continue that way for years to come.</end quote></div>


Compare cpu speed or ram speed from 10 years ago to now and the difference is dramatic. Do the same comparison for hard drives and the difference is far from dramatic.
</end quote></div>

Compare storage size now to ten years ago and the difference is VERY dramatic.

Consumers demand more space so that is where the majority of the R&D goes.</end quote></div>

I'd rather have less size and more speed. That is why they make storage drives.
Click to expand...

And yet most consumers demand more space, and don't experience large HD bottlenecks. They're driving demand and technology, not you. If you're having really bad HD problems then get a raptor for your OS and programs, or shell out the cash and get some iRAM. If you're on Vista you could add a 2GB flash drive for readyboost. You really have to expect the HD to be the slowest part in the system; as the first reply said it's not electronic like the rest of your PC, but mechanical and it'll always be slower than on-chip storage.
 
HD's will always be the slowest part of a PC for many reasons, to include:

1. Conversion of data from one media to another, that doesn't skim off a copyright lawyer's paycheck.
2. Moving parts are still slower than c.
 
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