Has mechanical drive technology stagnated?

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Soldato
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We all know that the terrible floods hurt the companies, but over recent months we haven't seen anything that is either restoring prices or increasing capacity.

There are numerous reports saying that the companies are making huge profits at the moment due to the high prices. It doesn't seem that any of this is going into R&D or anything.

Will SSD soon take over mechanical drives? In say a year or perhaps less?
 
There isn't much point in improving them other than increasing capacity, SSDs will replace them for everything other than backups and high capacity storage eventually.
 
Cant see ssd taking over for a long time yet i got 5 mechanical drives in my pc as ssds are no where big enought to take over also when an ssd goes faulty it goes faulty they do in such a big way that you cant recover whats on the drive.
 
chippy08 said:
Cant see ssd taking over for a long time yet i got 5 mechanical drives in my pc as ssds are no where big enought to take over also when an ssd goes faulty it goes faulty they do in such a big way that you cant recover whats on the drive.
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Getting bigger and cheaper just like mechanical drives did.

Apart from the data issue where I would imagine that people might want to stick with mechanical drives plus lifespan (ssd have a limited lifespan), I can see 1Tb ssd drives been affordable in the not too distant future and most people will just get them. Plus don;t forget you can set them up in an array so if one fails, no data is lost.

Plus you should do regular backups anyway ;)
 
Mechanical disk technology hasn't really stagnated, it's already reached it's zenith. Transfer speeds can't really get any higher with the current technology. Yes you can spin a disk faster or have more read/write heads but they only give marginal improvements.
 
I got a 3TB hard drive in america for under £100.

Doesn't seem like it's stagnating at all lol.

Until you can buy 1TB SSD's for anything under £500 mechanical drives aren't going anywhere
 
Its all down to areal density. fewer platters with more storage per platter. Currently at about 1Tb per platter on a 3.5" HDD. Any sort of leap in this direction is good. faster rotation is not necessarily useful due to noise and mechanical wear.
 
chippy08 said:
Cant see ssd taking over for a long time yet i got 5 mechanical drives in my pc as ssds are no where big enought to take over also when an ssd goes faulty it goes faulty they do in such a big way that you cant recover whats on the drive.
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No it doesn't. It just doesn't let you write more data.
 
i think the way hdds need to go is to cut speeds down to 5400rpm (noise, lifespan, heat, power) and increase areal density like nkata said. hdds are not at their peak. not until we have our 3tb per platter :p.

in the meantime, flash storage technology might well obliterate it. there are quite a few different flash technologies on the horizon that promise infinite erase cycles, faster speeds, and cheaper production. in the long run they'll probably obsolete ssds as well
 
the only thing that matters with hdds anymore is reliable storage. a single platter will make your drive much more secure, while having other miniscule benefits.
 
chippy08 said:
Cant see ssd taking over for a long time yet i got 5 mechanical drives in my pc as ssds are no where big enought to take over also when an ssd goes faulty it goes faulty they do in such a big way that you cant recover whats on the drive.
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They already have, the only real concern for newer and better hdd's(before ssd's) were we wanted more speed and in many situations the hdd transfer rate was by far the limiting factor in performance. This is no longer true, ssd's are quieter, massively massively faster, no mechanical parts, more reliable, use less power. That puts them hugely far ahead in all mobile applications, all performance applications and all reliability applications. HDD's are dead for anything except storage, the only reason people don't like blurays/dvd's for storage is frankly access and noise. A hdd is easier, quicker and far far higher capacity meaning far far less of them can be used.

Greebo said:
Getting bigger and cheaper just like mechanical drives did.

Apart from the data issue where I would imagine that people might want to stick with mechanical drives plus lifespan (ssd have a limited lifespan), I can see 1Tb ssd drives been affordable in the not too distant future and most people will just get them. Plus don;t forget you can set them up in an array so if one fails, no data is lost.

Plus you should do regular backups anyway ;)
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HDD's have a limited lifespan, I've still yet to see any ssd's I've had for the past 4-5 years fail from long term usage, though a couple have failed for other reasons. HDD's are mechanical, as such they most certainly have a lifespace. THe probability of a circuit failing is magnitudes lower than the probability of a mechanical motor failing. HDD's have always failed, and while there is no actual limit theoretically on the number of writes or read's that a HDD can perform, practically there is a limit to how long a hard drives parts will work.

Because hdd's are now all but relegated to storage only usage, the need for newer, faster drives has gone, 10 generations of speed improvements in hdd's won't touch a ssd or come anywhere near. The need for higher capacities isn't limited so much but less necessary purely because of the internet. Why do 1billion people need to all store an individual copy of a film, when we can store 100 copies and let 1 billion people access it online using a miniscule amount of storage space? I keep a ridiculous amount of tv but, 99% of it I can get in no time at all online. I keep it because I can, not because I need to and most people are the same.
 
Jay794 said:
Until you can buy 1TB SSD's for anything under £500 mechanical drives aren't going anywhere
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1Tb costs a little over 600 atm (2x512 i mean), i definetly believe within the next 2yrs or so we'll start seeing 512s hitting the 100-150 mark or even less. Things are looking up, hopefully they'll get more mainstream.
 
Jay794 said:
I got a 3TB hard drive in america for under £100.

Doesn't seem like it's stagnating at all lol.

Until you can buy 1TB SSD's for anything under £500 mechanical drives aren't going anywhere
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So something that was available a year ago at a similar price is an indication of progression?
3TB drives have been available for ages, only 1 manufacturer makes 4TB drives however.
 
well I'm already swapping out my 2tb for SSDS got the first 256gb yesterday and just pick one up each month and add it to the raid.
 
This is a good question. I want to purchase additional hard drives but at the current price, I feel robbed. I know its not ocuk fault cause all the sites are the same prices, so the prices are obviously fixed at the manufactures and distributors, that is why all the manufactures prices are exactly the same. When samsung came on to the market they brought prices down a lot but the samsung hd division was sold to a competitor then we had the floods and the excuses came to raise prices. I realy can't see them coming down any more, which is a shame because I need hard drives space and a lot of people will be wanting to upgrade from smaller drives to 2 and 3tb soon as their drives age. I think they are realy shooting themselves in the foot with the current prices. They could sell more units at a lower cost. But if they are still selling the same amount of units at these higher prices then you can't realy blame them for the prices. I can't realy see any other manufactures coming on to the market and changing things, it does not look like anyone else is going to join the mechanical hard drive market any time soon.
 
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mranderson said:
I can see the end of consumer hard disks with cloud storage.
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Don't see this happening for another 10 years at least. Maybe ok for a few GB of data, but do you think consumers will want to upload TBs of data over an internet connection?
Not to mention getting hit for bandwidth usage when wanting to access or stream from it.
 
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