Why have hard drive capacities slowed so much?

[Onceler]

I know that you can shrink the bits only so much but there is a lot of new tech to enable progress, so why is it that they are taking way to long to incorperate these new techs?

 

[LOL_Wut_Axel]

Nah, don't worry. 4TB and 5TB Hard Drives will be released shortly now that we broke 1TB/platter.

 

[Demon-Xanth]

The big slowdown is the 2.2TB BIOS limit. The market needs to get well filled with systems that are prepared to accept larger drives. So in the meantime, they're just getting cheaper.

 

[Nothinman]

The big slowdown is the 2.2TB BIOS limit. The market needs to get well filled with systems that are prepared to accept larger drives. So in the meantime, they're just getting cheaper.

EFI has been around for decades and UEFI 2.1 since 2007. If there's actually anything holding this back, it's Windows.

 

[Anteaus]

NTFS supports partitions up to 256 terabytes. Newer chipsets have EFI onboard with support for higher capacity drives. The limiting factor is purely hardware in this case. They can only squeeze so many GB per platter.

As things get smaller read/write errors become more numerous until eventually there is a practical limit. I think in the interim they are going to simply up the number of platters (5 at 4TB), but that comes with it's own penalties.

I'm looking forward to seeing what will replace the hard drive. Maybe large capacity SSDs? Anyone have any knowledge on whats coming up?

 

[GotNoRice]

EFI has been around for decades and UEFI 2.1 since 2007. If there's actually anything holding this back, it's Windows.

UEFI might have been out that long but it's meaningless until motherboard makers actually decide to use it (which is just happening now). UEFI has been supported in windows since Vista64, quite a while now.

In earlier versions of Windows like XP, you can still use 2TB+ partitions you just can't boot from them.

 

[Maximilian]

The big slowdown is the 2.2TB BIOS limit. The market needs to get well filled with systems that are prepared to accept larger drives. So in the meantime, they're just getting cheaper.

Isnt that only if you boot from the drive though? Like you could have a 64GB SSD as a boot drive alongside a 3TB HDD with an old bios and everything would work fine.

 

[Zap]

why is it that they are taking way to long to incorperate these new techs?

I think being online has skewed your sense of time. Don't worry, it is a fairly common affliction, and wanting time to move faster is the most common side effect.

😛

 

[Demon-Xanth]

EFI has been around for decades and UEFI 2.1 since 2007. If there's actually anything holding this back, it's Windows.

Doesn't matter if it's been around. If it's not common, the lack of it is going to be a problem. And currently it's far from ubiquitous. It's just now being common on new boards but you have years of non-UEFI systems that people will be trying these drives in.

The same thing happened in the 540MB era. Once systems with UEFI are the norm, they'll storm up until they run into the next barrier.

 

[Nothinman]

UEFI might have been out that long but it's meaningless until motherboard makers actually decide to use it (which is just happening now). UEFI has been supported in windows since Vista64, quite a while now.

In earlier versions of Windows like XP, you can still use 2TB+ partitions you just can't boot from them.

EFI is only really required for booting from >2TB drives. You can still use them for data storage as long as your OS supports GUID partition tables. But motherboard manufacturers aren't going to start doing that until Windows supports it and with the proliferation of XP machines still out there can you blame them for dragging their feet?

Doesn't matter if it's been around.

Of course it does, the hardware and software solutions have existed for decades but never got to the consumer market because Windows didn't support them until ~5 years ago, it's as simple as that.

The same thing happened in the 540MB era. Once systems with UEFI are the norm, they'll storm up until they run into the next barrier.

Maybe it's nostalgia giving me rose colored glasses or something, but that and the 137G LBA48 thing were relatively painless because it was just an IDE chipset issue. Updating the chipset and drivers on that one piece is a lot less invasive than replacing the initialization, POST and boot up firmware.

 

[Binky]

Diminishing returns. The number of people that need more than a 2-3-4 TB porn/Mp3/Video collection is lower than those that need a 1TB collection. The largest single drive in my house is still only 1TB. There are always outliers but the masses often don't need more than even 500GB.

 

[Fallengod]

I am actually the exact same way. The way I figure it is, if I have a drive go bad or just want to backup another drive, I dont want to have to deal with possibly losing 2TB's+ of data or backing up another 2+ TB's of data. Id rather have a smaller drive go bad. 1TB is the max HD size I use as well.

 

[Soulkeeper]

IMO they havn't been so aggressive because of the overall softness of the market/economy
similar to cpu's, It's not like it was 5+ years ago where it seemed like things were being made obsolete every few months.

 

[paperwastage]

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news...ease-hard-drive-density-sixfold-with-salt.ars

don't worry, there's still some research in HDDs on how to increase storage per unit space

 

[Concillian]

A lot of it was that when we moved to perpendicular recording, development was pretty rapid. It slowed down before the switch to perpendicular too. Longitudinal recording went from newly introduced to squeezing out tiny gains in like 30 years. Perpendicular has gone from new and in use to squeezing out tiny gains in like 5. To some extent victim of our own success.
People got a little used to the rather rapid growth when perpendicular was new and there was lots of "low hanging fruit" around to make rapid advancement. There is not a volume manufacturing new tech ready right now for rotating storage.

Any new tech will require huge amounts of capital (HAMR requires significantly higher temperature media manufacturing process, BPM / BPR is basically a 100% different process from current media processes and would require completely brand new media factories for every HDD MFR.) Given how commoditized HDDs are right now, I'm not sure the large capital to shift to a new tech is really going to make sense. 10 TB drives may be possible, but if it costs 3 or 4 times more than 3*3TB drives, who's going to buy them?

If you had to build a whole new factory, would you build a flash factory or a factory for a brand new rotating storage media type that may or may not be able to be brought down to a low enough price to be competitive?

 

[imagoon]

EFI is only really required for booting from >2TB drives. You can still use them for data storage as long as your OS supports GUID partition tables. But motherboard manufacturers aren't going to start doing that until Windows supports it and with the proliferation of XP machines still out there can you blame them for dragging their feet?



Of course it does, the hardware and software solutions have existed for decades but never got to the consumer market because Windows didn't support them until ~5 years ago, it's as simple as that.



Maybe it's nostalgia giving me rose colored glasses or something, but that and the 137G LBA48 thing were relatively painless because it was just an IDE chipset issue. Updating the chipset and drivers on that one piece is a lot less invasive than replacing the initialization, POST and boot up firmware.

Your rant doesn't make sense.... Windows supports EFI/UEFI. I have a couple of servers running it and did some testing with Windows 7 which also works. Your complaints about XP not supporting it is about the same as me whining that Debian REX doesn't have USB3 support....

It is still hit or miss to fine true UEFI boards out there. Nearly all servers support it, the consumer uptake has been a bit slow. For example my 4 year old desktop doesn't have it while my new laptop does.

 

[taltamir]

There was never a BIOS limit, and 2.2 is only if you use TB insetad of TiB to measure it.
There was a 32bit HDD controller with 512B Sectors limit.
32bit controller can address 32bits = 2^32 = 4294967296 sectors
4294967296 sectors * 512B a sector = 2 TiB limit. (exactly, I did not round it to get 2 TiB)

BIOS has always been capable of running 64bit controllers, but those only now came about because they were never needed before.
4Kn drives would be able to go to 16TiB per drive thanks to each sector being 8x the size.
64bit controller with 512B sectors can go to 2^64 * 512B = 8589934592 TiB
64bit controller with 4Kn can go to 8x that amount.

So the options to bypass the 2TiB limit are:
1. 64bit controller.
2. 4Kn drives

 

[Midwayman]

Diminishing returns. The number of people that need more than a 2-3-4 TB porn/Mp3/Video collection is lower than those that need a 1TB collection. The largest single drive in my house is still only 1TB. There are always outliers but the masses often don't need more than even 500GB.

Try building a HTPC DVR. Anyone who deals with HDTV video streams can eat TB up easy. Desktop use sure. Media server, not so much.

 

[frostedflakes]

Capacities are supposed to double roughly every two years. Looks like the first 1TB drive was introduced by Hitachi in January 2007, first 2TB by Western Digital in January 2009, and Seagate just recently introduced the first 4TB drives in September 2011. So seems like things have maybe slowed down a bit. Chalk it up to the poor economics conditions maybe, or maybe they are starting to run into far more technical issues when increasing aerial density than they have before.

I think it's still pretty incredible if you consider that the growth is exponential, though. In one two year time span they delivered a 500GB increase in space, then in the next one 1TB increase, then 2TB, etc. So even if it takes them a bit longer than two years to double capacity, things aren't really slowing down, density is still increasing at a faster rate than any previous period in history.

 

[VirtualLarry]

There was never a BIOS limit, and 2.2 is only if you use TB insetad of TiB to measure it.
There was a 32bit HDD controller with 512B Sectors limit.
32bit controller can address 32bits = 2^32 = 4294967296 sectors
4294967296 sectors * 512B a sector = 2 TiB limit. (exactly, I did not round it to get 2 TiB)

BIOS has always been capable of running 64bit controllers, but those only now came about because they were never needed before.
4Kn drives would be able to go to 16TiB per drive thanks to each sector being 8x the size.
64bit controller with 512B sectors can go to 2^64 * 512B = 8589934592 TiB
64bit controller with 4Kn can go to 8x that amount.

So the options to bypass the 2TiB limit are:
1. 64bit controller.
2. 4Kn drives

I think that you are wrong. There never was a 32-bit hardware controller limit, controllers went from 24-bit to 48-bit LBA. That's plenty of bits for sector addressing.

The problem with the 2TB limit indeed is the BIOS, specifically, booting and recognizing only an MBR-formatted bootsector instead of a GPT.

That's why you needed an OS that supported GPT partitions to utilize all of a data drive that was larger than 2TB, and you needed a BIOS that supported UEFI/GPT to boot off of an OS drive larger than 2TB.

 

[Ratman6161]

I think that about the time capacities hit 1 TB, they got about as big as most people will ever need. All my desktops at work have only 80 GB. Everyone stores their work on the file server anyway so a lot of space on individual machines would just be wasted.

For home users, for most people, 1 TB is as much as they will ever use and, personal opinion here, if you are running low, you are better off adding more 1 TB drives than you are going with a single bigger drive.

A final reason is that drive prices are so cheap that its hard for drive makers to justify larger capacities. For example I'm seeing a WD 2 TB Caviar Black for $85 on New Egg (out of stock at the moment). There is a 3 TB Hitachi for $120. Where is the incentive to bring out higher capacities? Wont they make more by selling you multiple smaller drives anyway?

 

[Anteaus]

For home users, for most people, 1 TB is as much as they will ever use and, personal opinion here, if you are running low, you are better off adding more 1 TB drives than you are going with a single bigger drive.

Lol statements like this are almost always patently false. We were told the same thing when we got our first 40MB hard drive. For the near term your right though. I could kill a 1TB drive easy with a selection of blu-ray movies and a few games. I think once digital distribution of media gets in full swing hard drive space will shrink rapidly. Mass physical mediums such as blu-ray, dvd or cds are already on borrowed time. It might take 5-10 years before high speed internet because fast enough and widespread enough to kill them, but it is inevitable. Why? Control

 

[MarkLuvsCS]

I'm afraid unless isps start treating bandwidth as a consumption priced media, we will be stuck with mediocre speeds with minimal caps to try to force us away from the digital age.

I see hdds continue their path of slowly increasing over time.

 

[lamedude]

We went from "over 200 HDD manufacturers" to 3.

 

[TakeNoPrisoners]

I thought it was because of the motherboard problem that wouldn't allow more than 2TB partitions.