Some industry observers, such as yours truly, believe that HDD (hard disk drive) capacities have already overshot the vast majority of computer users’ storage needs. As such, other factors beyond the historically dominant metrics of absolute capacity and cost/bit will gain in prominence as selection criteria. And those other factors, such as random access performance, power consumption, ruggedness, reliability, and operating noise, specifically favor the flash memory-based SSD (solid-state storage) apparent successor.
Mine is not, I admit, a universally held opinion within the analyst ranks. And for those who favor the continued dominance of capacity-related decision factors, the HDD suppliers (many of which, I’ll note, have recently also become SSD vendors) are providing plenty of ammo to bolster their stances. Consider, for example, some cost/bit promotional examples I collected just yesterday:
- A Samsung 3.5″ 1 TByte HDD for $49.99, along with a Western Digital 2 TByte model for $99.99 (both $0.05/GByte), and
- A Toshiba 2.5″ 500 GByte HDD for $49.99 ($0.10/GByte), all in contrast to
- A Corsair 2.5″ 32 GByte SSD for $58.99 ($1.85/GByte)
Now, from an absolute capacity standpoint, consider the industry news of just the past few days. Yesterday, for example, Western Digital unveiled a 3 Tbyte HDD in a 3.5″ ‘bare’ configuration ($239, quantity 1), following up on a USB3-interface external storage variant ($249.99, quantity 1) unveiled earlier this month. At first glance, WD’s announcement might seem to be a copy-cat; after all, I wrote up Seagate’s 3 Tbyte release back in early July (a product which is already down to $199.99 or less). However, as Anand also noticed and noted in his WD coverage, Seagate’s drive was a five-platter monster (I’m reminded of Hitachi’s four-platter 1 Tbyte premier in early 2007). Conversely, WD’s focus was on power consumption, not to mention cost reduction, so it was willing to delay its entré until it could shoehorn the requisite capacity into an industry-leading four-platter configuration.
Then there’s Hitachi, who also chose October 5 to launch a new product, this a 750 GByte 2.5″ HDD. Again, at first glance you might wonder what the big deal is; Western Digital launched a 1 TByte 2.5″ HDD more than a year ago, after all, and Seagate started shipping a 1.5 TByte portable external drive a month ago. But WD’s drive is a three-platter, 12 mm design (translation: thicker than normal, thereby unable to fit in some systems), and Seagate’s drive is an even more bloated four-platter arrangement. Hitachi’s $129.99 drive matches Seagate’s per-platter capacity but, since it’s a two-platter approach, it fits into a conventional 9.5mm chassis. And it comes in both 5,400 and (beginning in the first quarter of next year) 7,200 RPM variants. Effective drive capacity tends to decrease as rotational speeds increase, thereby making Hitachi’s high-speed product plans particularly notable from an areal density standpoint.
Regarding Seagate’s 3 TByte external drive, I wrote back in early July:
This drive has migrated from the traditional 512 byte sector size to the newer 4 Kbyte sector arrangement with resultant stronger ECC, as a means of more effectively mitigating the degrading effects of raw error rates. Unfortunately, the 4 Kbyte sector size is at minimum performance- and capacity-inefficient, and worst-case completely incompatible, with legacy operating systems when the drive is directly accessed by them. By putting an intelligent USB- or FireWire-to-SATA controller in-between the drive and system, however, such incompatibilities can invisibly be worked around by it.
An intermediary approach can eliminate some, but unfortunately not all, O/S cognizance problems. A bit over a year ago, I mentioned in a blog post that I was in search of 120 GByte HDDs because of capacity-limiting 28-bit-maximum logical block addressing support in some of my computers. Well, folks, at 3 TBytes we’re once again bumping up against legacy LBA issues driven by 32-bit-max access limitations. Specifically, the full capacity of the Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex drive (beyond ~2.1 Tbytes) can only be harnessed by systems that fully support 48-bit LBA; hardware, BIOS (specifically EFI), drivers, and one of the following operating systems:
- A 64-bit variant of Windows Vista or Windows 7 (including Windows Server variants derived from them)
- Mac OS 10.6 ‘Snow Leopard’, or
- A ‘modified’ Linux distribution
Unfortunately, as WD’s 3 TByte HDD system specifications suggest, I wasn’t underestimating the challenge of utilizing such an advanced drive. The 4 KByte sector size approach that I was speaking of is known as the Advanced Format; both the WD 3.5″ and Hitachi 2.5″ drives mentioned in this writeup employ it. And to get around at least some of the native system support shortcomings, WD is including an AHCI (Advanced Host Controller Interface)-compliant HBA (Host Bus Adapter) with the drive.
This board bundling is conceptually no different than Maxtor (now owned by Seagate) did when it was advocating ATA/133 drives in the absence of native chipset support for that particular proprietary PATA speed, for example, or what some early SATA drive suppliers did until native chipset support for the serial storage interface reached critical mass. Nonetheless, it’s a cost-burdening extra step that I’m sure WD will be happy to dispense with as soon as possible.
Super size me....
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