Why do we still have Hard drives?

snazzy_dazzy · 12 Jun 2007 at 16:45

Does anyone else feel frustrated that in an age where we are running gb's of ram running at insane speeds, GPU's with hundreds of millions of transisters, CPU capable of great things, that we are still being bottlenecked and limited by a mechanical device spinning @ 7200 rpm??

When is an alternative coming???

killer_uk · 12 Jun 2007 at 16:46

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/search_results.php?sortby=&groupid=&string=solid+state

But as you can see from the price, it's not really an option for the vast vast majority of people.

phi1 · 12 Jun 2007 at 16:49

would they really make much off a diffrence?

stickroad · 12 Jun 2007 at 16:54

Very interesting, whats the port connection on these things? Saids IDE on one of them, surely its not IDE as in IDE?

rick827 · 12 Jun 2007 at 16:58

yes IDE as in IDE, biggest market is laptops so most have the 44 (?) pin connectors for those.

Some 'to be released' ones have sata ports and a more 'relaxed' (cheaper) form, instead of cramming 64GB on a 1.8" disk etc. These look to be aimed more to the enthusiast market especially as they tend to advertise more about the throughput rather than seek times

Craig321 · 12 Jun 2007 at 16:59

RAID 0 16 of these: http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=HD-043-SA

stickroad · 12 Jun 2007 at 16:59

So super doppa fast drives and they are using a IDE controller? :confused:

ChrisD. · 12 Jun 2007 at 17:09

Problem is with solid state, is that they are far more prone to failure then a conventional HDD. For example, they won't like power cuts, and if you loose the data on one, it'll be far harder, if not impossible to retrieve it.

alexakasloth · 12 Jun 2007 at 17:12

Solid state and HD's made with RAM are supposed to be the way forward. Though I think the solid state drives or the RAM drives are not as fast as writing as conventional SATA HDs.

rudeboymcc · 12 Jun 2007 at 17:13

isn't the IDE controller able to handle much faster speeds than a 7200 hard disk?

snazzy_dazzy · 12 Jun 2007 at 17:14

dosent it bug you though?

Surely some boff somewhere has to have thought up a viable solution.

They are going on to .45 nm CPUS yet have to run in conjunction wiht some spinning disk :rolleyes:

Sinny · 12 Jun 2007 at 17:33

Their was an inventian a while back about using RAM as a hard drive and managed 8gb, it was called i ram i think and was blisteringly fast, but scsi still beats it, if you want something really fast then get a scsi drive which spins at 15,000rpm, but really should only be used in servers as the size on them isnt that huge unless you are willing to spend huge amounts of money.

Participant · 12 Jun 2007 at 17:54

The spinning disk doesn't affect performance once it's loaded to memory.

Werewolf · 12 Jun 2007 at 17:59

IDE 133 can move data far faster than any normal drive can consistantly provide it.

The main difference between SATA and IDE isn't so much the burst speeds (which are only there for a fraction of a second), but the physical connections are neater on SATA, and SATA has been designed with modern technology in mind (IDE was originally made to be cheap, with minimum processing on the drives, and whilst it has evolved it's been held back by the need to work with older devices/controllers).
The drop in the cost of chips and the lack of a requirement for backwards compatibility means that SATA can and does utilise methods to improve the performance where the physical medium of the drive is the bottleneck (things like command cueing lets the drive work out that it's faster to do things in sequence 1,3,2,4 than 1,2,3,4 as it requires less movement of the drive head).

As for why we're still using hard drives, it's pure cost

It costs far too much to provide tens (or hundreds) of gigs of storage, as already mentioned the next lot of drives are due to have (relatively) large amounts of solid state cache on them to improve performance.
Vista also tries to do something similar with it's use of USB sticks as storage.

drunkenmaster · 12 Jun 2007 at 18:46

the whole point is hard drives don't do much to limit our computing, 1 min is probo more than most computers take to boot to a completely usable state. and 30 seconds to load a level that will take 5-10 mins to complete and quite frankly once loaded the hard drive has no bearing on performance once into the level. solid state drives have a read/write limit on them still which is less than ideal, but they should have massively larger and faster solid state drives already for very cheap.

you talk about millions of transistors on a small process and other advances. every byte is stored on a hard drive, a 1 terrabyte drive, think about how much goes into a platter, how the data is stored and how good hard drives really are.

alexakasloth · 12 Jun 2007 at 19:42

How fast are seek times on SATA drives compared to USB drives?

Crowze · 13 Jun 2007 at 09:27

The drive itself will be identical, but the overhead from USB will normally add 2-3ms to the seek time. Not to mention the maximum throughput you'll get from USB2 is around 32MB/sec, which is far lower than what modern disks can handle.