1.5 tb hard drives

[clocker]

I don't think we'll be moving to SSD's anytime soon theyr still coming down in price too slowly and have issues of their own.

Care to elaborate about these "issues"?

[lee551]

dunno why people seem to be so pessimistic about the topic. most articles i read about it project them becoming more common in laptops thru 2009/10.

bitmicro announces 1.6TB ssd

[Busyman]

dunno why people seem to be so pessimistic about the topic. most articles i read about it project them becoming more common in laptops thru 2009/10.

What's the size and cost though?

I have no doubt you could get one if you pay a premium for it.

[macking]

I don't think we'll be moving to SSD's anytime soon theyr still coming down in price too slowly and have issues of their own.

Care to elaborate about these "issues"?

Writing speed is one BIG issue:

The problem is, in most cases, flash memory is not able to write data as quickly as a conventional hard drive. Jacqui Cheng of Ars Technica found that solid-state write speeds on a MacBook Air were between 13.86 and 14.67MB per second (MB/s), less than half as fast as the 33.3MB/s of a hard drive-equipped MacBook Air with its relatively slow-spinning 4200-RPM disk inside.

They can read slightly faster but the difference is practically tiny:

However, the MacBook Air's solid-state disk was able to read data slightly faster (between 7.29 and 49.59MB/s compared with the spinning drive's speed of 6.32 to 32.74MB/s on that same Macbook Air)

Cost is another issue a 64GB SSD will cost you 1000 dollars, you can buy a lot more HDD storage for that much.

And the whole thing about them taking up less battery life is mute too since the HDD only takes up 5% to 15% of a laptops battery.

http://dvice.com/archives/2008/02/shift_are_solid.php

This is a good read.

SSD's need improved writing speeds, more storage and much improved bang for buck before theyr even in the same league as HDD's let alone replacing them.

I like the idea of hybrid HDD's though

[clocker]

Your objection is basically cost/GB then.

The extended battery life due to lower power consumption is hardly a "MOOT" point...even a 10% increase is pretty significant, but I don't care about laptops anyway, so I'm willing to concede the point.
Besides, of far bigger import to laptop users would be the resistance to shock and the SSDs general durability.

Read/write speeds are simply a matter of fine tuning the technology- even mechanical drives have benefited from new algorithms- and applying newer chip designs (which seem to come out almost monthly).
Look at the speed differential between DDR1 and DDR3...two years ago DDR3 was just a rumor and now it's set to become the standard.
Do you doubt the same progression will not apply to SSDs?

Back to price...again, any new tech is always very expensive for early adopters- take SLI, for instance.

I just don't think you naysayers are taking a very long perspective regarding SSDs- and by perspective, I mean computer time which is roughly equivalent to dog years.
So go ahead, keep investing in mechanical drives- after all, they are dirt cheap these days- but don't kid yourself by thinking that they won't soon become as obsolete as the floppy drive.

[lee551]

dunno why people seem to be so pessimistic about the topic. most articles i read about it project them becoming more common in laptops thru 2009/10.

What's the size and cost though?

I have no doubt you could get one if you pay a premium for it.

first paragraph says it's the size of a standard 3.5in hdd, and i'm sure it costs more than my first car.

not telling everyone that we should go buy them tomorrow at all. it's just fun to see the progress being made. i wonder if i can hold out on a new rig until they're commonplace.

[kooftspc11]

goddamn solid state drives cost 1 billion dollars right now for like 2gb

[macking]

Read/write speeds are simply a matter of fine tuning the technology- even mechanical drives have benefited from new algorithms- and applying newer chip designs (which seem to come out almost monthly).

Thats fair enough but the fact remains that at the moment the speeds of the drives are dreadful when it comes to writing and at this very moment it is unknown when that will be remedied.

You can't predict the future you can only talk about now and if it changes I will concede the point but "at this moment in time" SSD's are incredibly slow at writing.

Look at the speed differential between DDR1 and DDR3...two years ago DDR3 was just a rumor and now it's set to become the standard.
Do you doubt the same progression will not apply to SSDs?

I don't see how that is a fair comparison when we moved to DDR2 it was just an evolution of DDR1 because DDR1 had hit the limit.

With HDD's to SSD's HDD's haven't hit the limit.

It's not like we're talking the xbox off the market and replacing it with something else these are two different products competing .

SSD progress is staggering but the cost and write speed is ridiculous.

That might be cured within a year or might take a decade but at this moment in time a HDD is simply a better investment.

Back to price...again, any new tech is always very expensive for early adopters- take SLI, for instance.

SLI is still the minority very few percent of GPU users even have a graphics card at all since 70% of graphics card sales are IGP's.

The point your making is not a valid one IMO though because flash is improving price/GB but the price isn't improving as fast as HDD's.

I just don't think you naysayers are taking a very long perspective regarding SSDs- and by perspective, I mean computer time which is roughly equivalent to dog years.
So go ahead, keep investing in mechanical drives- after all, they are dirt cheap these days- but don't kid yourself by thinking that they won't soon become as obsolete as the floppy drive.

SSD's may have a bright future since they do have advantages and the technology is developing at a staggering rate but at this moment in time they are too expensive, theyr coming down in price slower than traditional HDD's and they write too slowly.

I don't know if these problems will get remedied in a short period of time or whether they will stay with SSD for a long time.

End of the day whatever the future brings is up for debate SSD may very well replace HDD but I doubt it will be within the next couple of years anyway so I'd say go out and buy your HDD's at this moment in time and probably for the foreseeable future it's a better option.

[clocker]

SSD endurance.
SSD speed.
Note that for the drives we would be particularly interested in (2.5/3.5" SATA) the average read/write is 100 MB/s which compares quite favorably with the fastest mechanical HDD.
Coupled with the huge advantage in seek time- a fraction of a mechanical unit's- and the noise factor (none!), I would posit that for the average user (i.e., NOT a server environment or data center crunch machine), a SSD is already a step up from a mechanical drive in every aspect save price.

At this point in their development, I would liken the mechanical hard drive to a NASCAR engine.
Every season they manage to tweak a bit more power and reliability of them but they are completely irrelevant to mainstream technology...they're V-8s with pushrods and carbs, fer crissake and there isn't a single showroom model that can be bought with that sort of technology.

If you look at mechanical drives, their technical improvements have all sprung from changes in the transfer bus (SATA2>PATA), added cache (which is flash based) and platter density.
Why do you think that Raptors don't come in large sizes?
Why hasn't spindle speed increased along with everything else?

Finally, I personally think that the whole "size matters" issue is a complete red herring.
After my experience in the computer repair biz, I can state with absolute confidence that the "average user" of a computer has no need whatsoever for a hard drive larger than 80GB.
Probably 90% of the machines we worked on weren't even using 20GB of storage space- and these were older machines with several years of use on them.

Granted, with the release of Vista (which starts out over 7GB!) this will change a bit, but even ceding creeping OS bloat, 80GB would suffice for years of normal use.
It's a complete mistake to assume that the folks who populate forums like this (including me) are even remotely typical.
The normal user will never download a movie or TV show and thinks that a few hundred .jpgs and .mp3s is a lot of data.

The other red herring issue I've seen lately is data recovery.
How can you recover data lost from a SSD?
Don't know, don't care.

Most users are completely oblivious to even the most rudimentary forms of backup and aren't willing to pay for current methods of forensic recovery anyway, so whether the data disappears from a mechanical drive or a SSD, the end result is the same.
And, quite frankly, the "data" they lose is generally garbage to begin with.

Oh well, I don't know what else to say except time will tell, won't it?

[macking]

SSD endurance.
SSD speed.
Note that for the drives we would be particularly interested in (2.5/3.5" SATA) the average read/write is 100 MB/s which compares quite favorably with the fastest mechanical HDD.
Coupled with the huge advantage in seek time- a fraction of a mechanical unit's- and the noise factor (none!), I would posit that for the average user (i.e., NOT a server environment or data center crunch machine), a SSD is already a step up from a mechanical drive in every aspect save price.

Your points are good but you seem to be downplaying the factor that has determined failure in other superior technologies through technology history.

Price.

At this point in their development, I would liken the mechanical hard drive to a NASCAR engine.
Every season they manage to tweak a bit more power and reliability of them but they are completely irrelevant to mainstream technology...they're V-8s with pushrods and carbs, fer crissake and there isn't a single showroom model that can be bought with that sort of technology.

I compare it a petrol engine versus a hydrogen fuel engine.

The hydrogen fuel engine has a lot of advantages but at this moment it isn't ready to replace petrol engines and it is a toss up on when it will mature enough and be viable from a price point of view.

If you look at mechanical drives, their technical improvements have all sprung from changes in the transfer bus (SATA2>PATA), added cache (which is flash based) and platter density.
Why do you think that Raptors don't come in large sizes?
Why hasn't spindle speed increased along with everything else?

As long as the technology keeps evolving and comes at a better pricepoint it will keep making sales.

If you look at SSD sales to HDD sales you can see for yourself how popular HDD's are.

Also HDD technology isn't dead just after going to perpendicular recording and improving speeds we have Seagate working on HAMR technology which will give us 5Tb HDD's in 2010 and is capable of delivering upto 300Tb HDD's.

Also Hitachi have shrunk the drive recording heads to half the size they are now.

Finally, I personally think that the whole "size matters" issue is a complete red herring.
After my experience in the computer repair biz, I can state with absolute confidence that the "average user" of a computer has no need whatsoever for a hard drive larger than 80GB.
Probably 90% of the machines we worked on weren't even using 20GB of storage space- and these were older machines with several years of use on them.

I disagree with you on this point I think storage will come extremely important in the future.

Case in example is online downloads.

I've read 50% of all internet traffic is bit torrent type traffic.

Thats a lot of downloading going on.

Apple's iStore has accumulated 4 billion song downloads, 50 million TV episodes and 1.3 million full lenght movies.

Thats not to mention Microsoft's plans to distribute HD movies over the internet in the coming years.

If they succeed in turning the PC into a Home Theater Centre Piece we're going to need all the storage we can get.

Granted, with the release of Vista (which starts out over 7GB!) this will change a bit, but even ceding creeping OS bloat, 80GB would suffice for years of normal use.
It's a complete mistake to assume that the folks who populate forums like this (including me) are even remotely typical.
The normal user will never download a movie or TV show and thinks that a few hundred .jpgs and .mp3s is a lot of data.

Thats a good point but people like bit torrent, Apple and Microsoft are having great success over populating out hard drives and when you look at their grand plans to offer HD content over the internet eventually you can see we're going to need a lot more than 20GB or 80GB

Oh well, I don't know what else to say except time will tell, won't it?

I think time will tell but you seem to be writing the death warrant of hard drives already.

Like I said I'm not sure what will come of the HDD vs SDD thing since theyr too of the fastest moving and most aggressive markets around.

HDD's may be dead in 5 years or SDD may never take off I just can't make that prediction and I don't think anybody else can either.

I think it is a wait and see situation since both have their own advantages at this moment in time and the people behind them are working on some interesting technologies that could have a big impact in the coming years.

Intel are working on phase changing flash memory which could easily rival anything HAMR could lead to.

Talking about right now though I'd take the mechanical relic because it costs a lot less.