Wednesday, March 9, 2011

Higher capacity hard drives, foresaw the future that all approaches

After the purchase of Hitachi by the landscape of Western Digital hard drive market remains quite short: the very Western Digital, Seagate and Samsung. Precisely this has been presented at CeBIT last one of his most interesting research in the future, in conjunction with our computer mass storage. Hard disks has shown whose dishes offering a capacity of 1 TB each.

"Plates? What? Traditional hard disks, the magnetic life are built on several plates each of which offers some capacity. Currently, a 3.5-inch hard disk usually consists of two, three or four courses, each of which has 500 or 750 GB capacity. The sum of all is the total available space on a hard disk.

Samsung has made each dish has 1 TB of capacity, so that improve the current figure. Given the increasing density of information will be "easy" to get hard drives 4 TB. At least start there. The improvement of the density per platter is a very logical impact: data to be closer together, the operations related to the hard drive are faster because of less space, less time searching, writing and others.

How much better? There is no universal law about it, but it can not be treated as a remarkable improvement. Traditionally with every improvement in density has managed to win a minimum percentage of between 5 to 10%, sometimes even less. The performance of a hard drive depends largely on other factors such as the dispersion of the data, the number of files that are managed, the amount of memory on the buses and the applications used, among others.

The improved performance was clear, though the increased amount is minimal. However there is one major snag: a higher density higher capacity, but if for whatever reason breaks down the hard disk (or one of their dishes) also affect a greater amount of information. Is the price. The greater the dishes will be greater capacity than a hard drive will hold, but in case of malfunction also lose more data.

It is also necessary to comment that the current hard disks are very safe compared to some years ago, since they include certain safety devices to prevent unexpected failures. For now there is nothing on the market, but there is a view of what will be within a few months. Samsung will begin to use their dishes with 1 TB hard drives range of Samsung SpinPoint EcoGreen, whose main characteristic is that they are low and have a disk speed of 5,400 rpm.

According to analysis TomsHardware this family of products is usually around 85 MB / s, so that new models will remain below the 100 MB / s, and probably only reach 90 MB / s. Very low figures in comparison with other models available in the market. Do not forget that this will be only the beginning, the first of its products.

In the future disks will most potent of 7,200 rpm, as well of course notebook hard drives. In this case there will be 4 TB, of course, as the disc surface is much smaller, but will take advantage of developments in the dishes of 3.5-inch drives also improve the figures of 2.5 inches. I would say that throughout this year we will have up to 2 TB of capacity.

Let's do a little reflection about this improvement developed by Samsung. The hard drives will be in future mass storage our computers, while the SSD devices will be based on which practically all software and programs. The reason is simple. Only manufacturers are improving the performance of hard drives, and in return it seems that only seek to achieve the highest possible capacity.

This example of Samsung is the clearest demonstration of this. For their part, the SSD numbers are much better, and growth (in terms of power) does not seem to end. In the last two or three years have been doubling transfer rates, which is simply a genius. Personally I do not think that hard drives are gone, at least not in a period of a few decades.

It was also said that the tapes would eventually die and is the means used by many companies to perform your backups. On the other hand we have the prices of the SSD are dwindling, and their growth in performance is tremendous and to have no end (though of course it will end up with). We have models such as the latest OCZ Vertex 3 to reach 500 MB / s, figures of around five times more than a traditional hard drive.

The trouble is that the skills seem to grow very slowly, and now only offer up to 256 GB of capacity. Time is what you need, just a few years. "Hard drives? Past performance and future mass storage. "SSD? No doubt the great and interesting future. Place your bets. Bonus: Do you know Thunderbolt? Well, something tells me that the storage of the future will also go low light and no electricity, although it may be an evolution that even our great grandchildren to see in their lives.

What do you say? Buzz In Tech News | Hard Drive, SSD. Image | SPBer in Wikipedia. Track | TechSpot.

No comments:

Post a Comment