Huge Drives

Posted on July 10, 2008

My goodness, it seems like only yesterday that drive manufacturers were breaking through to the 1 Terabyte hard drive. Actually, it was in early 2007 when it happened so 18 months have passed and that seems to be the timeline for seeing new advances hit the market.

Now Seagate has moved out ahead becoming the first to announce a 1.5 Terabyte drive. Others will be following soon.

There’s nothing particularly spectacular about the new drives, excepting the huge capacity of course. Now that this barrier has been broken, we in our impatience want to know when we will see 2TB. Answer? Probably in another 18 months.

Since we’re still talking magnetic drives using platters, it means getting to 500GB per platter and stacking 4 to hit the 2TB mark.

The flip side of all this is the steadily dropping price of solid state drive (SSD) technology. The SSD products in large capacity are coming from all the manufacturers but they will coexist with magnetic technology for some time yet as production and marketing have to find a way to keep per megabyte storage costs down. No doubt, SSD will eventually take the day, but not this day.

I can see SSD gaining the lead in about 3 years or so IF the technology to provide 5TB drives is available and affordable by then. An array may be the approach taken to get the technology fully implemented. If not, magnetic drives could continue to rule the roost for an additional 2-3 years.