I don't think this is quite right.
Physical size of the platter doesn't change.
To increase the capacity of a drive either the
data density has to grow (i.e., implement perpendicular recording, for instance) or another platter is added- or both.
Originally Posted by
tmo85
How long untill 1.5 TB HD are available? Will there be performance gains? will they run more quietly or more power efficient?
Current HDDs are dinosaurs and investing in large capacity units seems like a bad idea to me.
Solid state drives are going to become the norm- sooner rather than later- and run silently while using less power and generating less heat.
A side benefit to the commercialization of SSDs will be the elimination of optical drives as well.
We've seen the continuous increase in capacity- coupled with a corresponding drop in price- of thumb drives, to the point where it will soon be economically feasible to provide content (both software and media) on a USB drive rather than a disk.
This couples with the ability of new operating systems (i.e., Vista) to boot from a flash drive, thus, no disks needed.
This should lead to a fairly radical change in the appearance of desktop PCs.
If you look at the design of cases, one of the major parameters is that it's necessary to accommodate the size of an optical drive, both it's width and depth. To a slightly lesser degree, this is also true of mechanical HDDs.
Remove these two units from the picture and now the case need only be large enough to fit the motherboard and power supply and all you need to interface with the PC is access to a USB port.
Should be interesting.
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