Want a whopping 170GB hard drive?

[jadison]

Fujitsu has developed new hard drive technology that may help to stem the expected slowdown in the rate of growth for hard drive capacity.

Manufacturers have been able to double the capacity of hard drives over the past 4 to 5 years. But as the gigabytes stack up, analysts and industry insiders are expecting the overall growth rate to slow as technological limitations take hold. To prevent this, hard drive makers are working to test the boundaries of storage capacity. Fujitsu's hardware, the company says, incorporates "sensitive" technology that can read more data off hard drive platters inside the drive where data is stored.

Read more at ZDNet News (http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1103-909613.html)

Post your comments Here.

[NDC]

Personally, having huge drives like that gets me rathered paranoid. Just imagine if that drive ever decided to go south on you. And where would you back up the contents of that drive?

[otheos]

Hm, platter density has hardly been the reason they stopped putting out drives. 60GB/pratter drives should have come a while back.

Some say that with the ban of napster and the cease of mp3 exchange the starvation for storage was saturated and large drives just stopped selling.

However the problem is purely logistics. Who would buy a 200GB drive that uses the same mechanical part as a 40GB drive? Because transfer rate (directly proportional to the platter density) is hardly the issue in a storage subsystem. 90% of the time the hd is seeking, not reading.

With IDE drives being budget limited, 7200rpm has been the ceilling for quite some time and while many speculate 10K rpm IDE drives are the next step up, increasing the spindle speed by 2800rpm merely decreases latency by 2ms at a cost hugely disproportionate, that will bring the cost of ownership near the SCSI 10K drives, that eventhough offer less storage, boost significantly lower access times (partly because of the lower desnity and maintly because of the higher speed actuator arms). And if they even increase platter density those 2ms will be cancelled out completely.

This technology however sounds pretty interesting towards a different direction. Miniaturisation. I.e moving towards 2.5" desktop drives (SCSI is already running 3" platters) and also provide more space for the laptops with current drive sizes, or comparable capacity at even smaller ones.

[jadison]

As always your experience and insight is very welcome Otheos. I've learned a lot from you. :)

[dusty]

I agree with NDC about a drive going south. But I would backup on a box used only for storage. Since I have just ordered the WD120gig, this is what I will be doing. Only reason I went BIG is because Even if I do backup to another box, I still like having all my data on my Box.

Rick

[fosin]

Hmmm, Interesting...

Originally posted by otheos
...moving towards 2.5" desktop drives (SCSI is already running 3" platters) and also provide more space for the laptops with current drive sizes, or comparable capacity at even smaller ones.

That would be nice. I wish the desktop CD drives would get smaller also. They are way too big (well, when dealing with micro/flex cases).

[Axel]

I'm holding out for solid state RAM drives - but they are still a bit expensive running at over $5333.00 per GB on the small models......