Whatever happened to hard drive development?

[FragrantHead]

Does anyone know what's happening with the development of hard drive's in the 2.5" arena? Are manufacturer's solely concentrating on the smaller sizes now? I'm using the 7K60 7,200 RPM drive for over 1 1/2 years and as far as I can see it's still the fastest product out there. That's weird. I'd have expected some advances by now. No news on the Hitachi web-site and Seagate is still touting the advantages of 5,400 RPM, which was already out-of-date when they introduced the range.

The ironic thing is that hard drive performance can still make such a difference to boot, load and search times, whereas for the majority of my day-to-day work I couldn't care less whether my CPU is 2GHz, 3GHz or an equivalent Centrino. Perhaps hard disk manufacturer's have missed the boat on the advertising front? I bet, if there was a "Hitachi-inside" campaign, the situation would be different.

[jdhurst]

I was never convinced that selling San Jose to Hitachi was a smart move. Asian manufacturers like to clone things and make them productively. True technological advancement sometimes comes more slowly than I would like from them. ... JD Hurst.

[dfumento]

On Tomshardware there was an announcement for a Toshiba 120 GB notebook drive.

[Roland]

@dfumento: can you give us a link to this news announcement at Tomshardwareguide. I can't find it.

@FragantHead: http://notebookforums.com/showthread.ph ... entus+7200

It seems in May we all can get a real successor for the 7k60...hopefully these drives will work reliable...

Roland, Taipei

[Batuta]

...

[slagmi]

IBM in particular has exited the hard disk business and is investing a lot of $$ in R&D concerning other storage technologies.

[dfumento]

@dfumento: can you give us a link to this news announcement at Tomshardwareguide. I can't find it.


Roland, Taipei

Sorry, I definately saw it. I thought it was in the news section, but I can't find it.

[Roland]

dfumento,

no problem. I also read at notebookforums.com something about an announced Sager notebook with a 120 GByte drive from Toshiba (as you have mention it) but even on Toshibas homepage I can't find any news about it.
I wonder if this drive will have a nice performance and yes, of course, it should be resistant enough to work reliable.

I would be already happy, if Hitachi would release the 5k100 drives with 100GByte at 5400rpm but even this seems to be wishful thinking only!?

I really share FragrantHead's opinion that not so much happened to the capacity and/or performance of notebook hard disk drives the past two years. Really strange in this highly competitive electronics business nowadays.

I've read so much about new ideas (Seagate, Hitachi, IBM...) how to increase storage capacity of hard disk drives with very smart explanations how it could work in the future and they have talked about to increase it up to some hundreds of GByte for the 2.5" drives but it seems to be still a leading edge technology.
Clearly you can ruin your reputation pretty fast nowadays if these important parts (like hard disks are) fail and cause in this way an immense damage for the user who loose in the worst case all his data.

On the other hand the margin/profit which you can make with hard disk drives is - compared to optical drives - still pretty high. However, for higher platter capacities you need new manufacturing lines (similar to wafer technologies) and this makes a change in the generation more difficult than a design change of motherboards, graphic adapters or optical drives, where often only different parts were assembled on.

These are my two cents only...

Roland, Taipei

[awolfe63]

It turns out that it is very difficult to make a drive that is both fast and low power - and low power and capacity have been the market drivers.