Hard Drives

[destron0]

I made a prediction a couple years ago that said hard drives would grow to such a large size that you could begin to ignore the size of a file and concentrate only on what files you wanted to have. We are pretty much there:

Western Digital "Green Power" 1 TB Drive

(Review at silent PC Review)

This drive is amazing for a couple reasons.

1. Large 1 terabyte size (1000 gigabytes). Enough to store 3000 CD's or 150 DVD's in lossless format.
2. Lower power consumption (40% less than other drives, also leads to lower heat production. Good for data centers that use a large number of drives.)
3. Extra quiet (partially thanks to optimum seek speed, lower spin speed (5400 vs. 7200) parking the heads during idle and motor shafts secured at both ends. Should lead to increased reliability as well)

This is more drive space than 95% of average users will realize. The only application that can use up hard drives of this size is raw video editing or large DVD collections. When drives hit about 10 TB there will be no barrier for video and the only need for larger drives will be data centers.

A problem with having an extra large hard drive is the inability to back it up. Backup solutions have fallen far behind drive size. Even if you had a 50GB blu-ray drive, it would take 20 disks to back up the whole 1 TB drive. Time consuming and expensive. The only backup solution is a second, external hard drive that mirrors the first. Additionally, back up especially important data to DVD.

I believe we will start to see the emergency a new "cache" or intermediary drive between the main drive and the memory. The data path will be:

CPU <-- L1 cache <-- L2 cache <-- RAM <-- intermediary drive <-- main drive

This is especially useful in portable application where battery life is an issue. Use an intermediary drive from flash memory (along the lines of 8-16 GB, increasing to 64-128 GB in the next couple years) will keep the laptop from having to spin up its main drive most of the time, therefore reducing power consumption. The main technological barriers to this are

1. Flash memory has a limited number of write cycles before it goes bad. Increase the limit
2. Software that is aware of the cache drive to store often used static files. Do not use temp files in the flash memory to avoid overwriting the same area multiple times, therefore driving the flash memory to corruption.

At a price of around $250 for the drive, you can't complain. Makes my hard drive collection look a little ridiculous.