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Why haven't laptop hard drives increase in size (space) ?

My guess would be laptops aren't generally used for mass storage so anything over 2tb or so doesn't make sense. If you need more space, get an external drive or upgrade to a higher end laptop that can accommodate two drives. I only have a 120gb SSD in my laptop, just enough for the OS, some app's, and the occasional download. Once home, I transfer anything large to my server.
 
There is also a vertical space issue, they can't exactly go around adding more platters.
Though, if they really wanted to, they could use He, add more platters, and have a nice sized 2.5" drive...for 4-5x the cost. Yeah, not many takers for that.

The other option is to increase density per platter, but, that is how they got to the current limit.
 
At this point, it seems that you're more likely to see SSDs beyond 2TB in a laptop than spinning hard drives. It's much easier to increase the density of a flash memory chip.
 
pcslookout said:
Why haven't laptop hard drives increase in size (space) ?
Click to expand...

Laptop hard drives go up to 5TB, I just put one in last week...although those are the thicker 15mm versions & most laptops don't take them, you need something like a specialty Sager gaming laptop or the like to fit them. Most of the newer ones are the slimmer 7.5mm models so that you can have a thinner laptop. ime, laptop hard drives have a much higher failure rate than desktop hard drives, because they are more prone to getting damaged from people dropping their laptops while the drive is spinning & so on.

SSD's are also crossing over mechanical mobile storage at this point. For one thing, the newer laptops are not only supporting mSATA & M.2 drives, but 2280 NVMe drives as well, so you can have a wicked fast SSD that is the length of your pinky finger & only 2.38mm thick (i.e the new 960 Pro's from Samsung). The NVMe's currently go up to 2TB & the traditional 2.5" mobile SSD's go up to 4TB. The only catch is the cost for the capacity, but that will drop eventually. But it makes much more sense to have a fast, cool-running, non-mechanical SSD inside of a mobile laptop device that is subjects to lumps & bumps.

I think most manufacturers see the cost per gigabyte coming down on SSD's & don't want to invest in advanced the state of mechanical mobile drives. You can always buy a 4-bay Sager mega-laptop & RAID the internal drives together if you need massive storage, or else get a portable 4TB slim USB-powered external drive for around $115, or else get an A/C-powered 10TB single-drive USB external for $400.
 
I love how people ask questions like this when the answer is obvious, they haven't made higher density platters at this size yet.
 
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