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george parker wrote:
I had a 300 Gb Maxtor disk fail just before Xmas after about 2 1/2 years. Started making funny noises when searching so swapped out before full failure.Well the Next Big Thing(TM) is SSD drives, I gather there is a little bit of life left in hard drives yet, I mean they're up at about 2TB now, maybe they could get a bit bigger, but now SSD prices are falling and capacities are getting bigger, maybe eventually we'll all go over to them. I was looking at SSD prices the other day in fact. I believe I saw a 40GB Intel one for about £93. I'd consider something like that for my notebook when I eventually rebuild my desktop then I won't need as much portable storage (and maybe by then the prices might have come down a bit more).Following this thread I wonder if we're hitting the limits of the technology. The drive (no pun intended) has been to get more and more bits per square centimetre on the platters and this has been done by improving all the stages of storage, platter material, write mechanism, read mechanism, control electronics, mechanics, motors etc. but generally not new science.
I remember my first hard drive was a scrap 5Mb one I got from work, the size of a house brick and I hooked it into my Amstrad 1640. The HD du jour for those with long pockets was 40 Mb only half the size of a house brick. The pressure on the manufacturers was to get to 100Mb, 500Mb, 1Gb, 100Gb, 500Gb and recently 1 terrabyte. There have been several jumps in technology, I can't remember the jump points, but I think the last one was about 100Gb. More and more design and manufacturing improvements since then but I think they have run out of jumps.I remember it going from something like 20MB to 40MB, then 60MB, 80MB, 130MB, 210MB, 420MB, 750MB, 1GB, 1.2GB, 2.1GB, 3.2GB, 4.3GB, 8.4GB, and so on (with a few different capacities in between)...
I remember my first hard drive was a 40MB drive, can't remember what make, might have been a Seagate. I also bought a knackered IBM 170MB which was noisy and had about 50MB of bad sectors. Suffice to say it didn't last long, I only paid about a fiver for it though.
Then my next purchase was a 1GB Seagate hard drive for just under £150, followed by a 4X CD-ROM drive the following week for about £120.
The rate of development of storage size and sales pressure to be first or at least close IMHO has resulted in any improvements to be used in increasing storage size rather than improving reliability. In these conditions the more you squeeze for size the less reliable the product will be. I think we need a spell of consolidation. I think the next big step will come from new science, but I could (and have been) wrong.I've got a couple of Seagate and Maxtor hard drives from around 120GB to 750GB of varying ages, anything from about 5 years old to about 12 months old, all of them are still working fine :-)
I do worry sometimes though about backing up so much data. For instance, backing up family photos and videos (especially now we have a HD camcorder) is starting to take up loads of DVDs. I could chuck them on to a hard drive, but then the hard drive could fail. Even Bluray at 25/50GB isn't that much space although I see the media is down to a couple of quid per disc now so it's getting close to the price where I'll buy a Bluray writer and some discs.
Rob -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html