The relentless march of hard drive capacity is about to reach its next cantonment as 500 GB 2.5″ drives begin to arrive this month. These little half-terabyte wonders will continue the downward pressure on price and challenge flash-based drives just as they stake their claim in the main stream of the market. Continue Reading »
I will begin my overview of the specialized hard drive market with the ubiquitous desktop disk drive. While just about any drive could be used in a desktop computer, the class is generally defined by what it lacks - compact size, power efficiency, exotic interfaces, special drive features, and high performance are all generally not required.
My survey did reveal a surprising range of devices, even given these limited requirements. Although no 5400 RPM drives are currently being sold for desktop use, there is (one) 10,000 RPM desktop drive! And a few of the larger drives are showing up with mondo caches - up to e32 MB! I bet these cache sizes will put the squeeze on hybrid drives…
Really, desktop drives are mostly notable for what they are doing to the enterprise market, which I’ll cover tomorrow. But for now, click through for the full story on the desktop drive market!
Lately, there has been a lot of buzz in the enterprise storage arena about whether so-called “enterprise drives” are really any better than plain-Jane hard drives in Enterprise applications. This came to a head with the controversial findings of Google and CMU, but it’s been simmering under the covers everywhere from TiVo communities to gamers. I’ve normally been loathe to focus on a product so mundane as a hard disk unit in this blog, but I find that their functionality ripples up to the highest levels of strategic buying.
So what makes a great hard disk drive? It turns out that the major manufacturers have a lot of ideas, segmenting and specializing their product lines faster than anyone can keep up with it. I realized that I really knew very little about these important components and set out to learn more.
So all next week, I’m going to highlight each segment of the hard disk industry, discussing the various models of drives offered and the reality of their specialization.
I’ll be looking at drives from the following manufacturers:
And I’ll be covering the following market segments:
At the end, I’ll sum up my findings and opinions on this amazingly diverse market. Note that, while I focus on enterprise data storage as a professional consultant, I’m no disk drive market insider. I’m researching and learning, and I value input from others, especially on this topic!
Enterprise Storage at FriendFeed
