• Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer
  • Home
  • About
    • Stephen Foskett
      • My Publications
        • Urban Forms in Suburbia: The Rise of the Edge City
      • Storage Magazine Columns
      • Whitepapers
      • Multimedia
      • Speaking Engagements
    • Services
    • Disclosures
  • Categories
    • Apple
    • Ask a Pack Rat
    • Computer History
    • Deals
    • Enterprise storage
    • Events
    • Personal
    • Photography
    • Terabyte home
    • Virtual Storage
  • Guides
    • The iPhone Exchange ActiveSync Guide
      • The iPhone Exchange ActiveSync Troubleshooting Guide
    • The iPad Exchange ActiveSync Guide
      • iPad Exchange ActiveSync Troubleshooting Guide
    • Toolbox
      • Power Over Ethernet Calculator
      • EMC Symmetrix WWN Calculator
      • EMC Symmetrix TimeFinder DOS Batch File
    • Linux Logical Volume Manager Walkthrough
  • Calendar

Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat

Understanding the accumulation of data

You are here: Home / Everything / Enterprise storage / Big Little Disks Are On The Way

Big Little Disks Are On The Way

June 16, 2008 By Stephen Leave a Comment

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.

Although Hitachi was first to announce and ship a 2.5″ 500 GB drive, theirs used four platters, pushing thickness to 12.5 mm – too much for most laptops and external enclosures.  So Samsung’s announcement of their 9.5 mm two-platter SpinPoint M6 disk was greeted with enthusiasm, but it has taken months for actual drives to ship.  

All that looks to be changing, however, as at least one vendor is currently offering SpinPoints for sale in the United States, and OEMs are rapidly raising their hands.  Earlier this week it was familiar name Verbatim, who announced a 500 GB addition to their SmartDisk line.  Today it is Mac-friendly LaCie with a dual-drive bus-powered RAID 0 unit delivering a massive terabyte in a palm-sized package.

All this mobile storage goodness will continue pushing cost down and capacity up in the hot mobile market.  Where 120 GB was exciting last year, today we are seeing 200, 250, and even 320 GB drives in affordable notebooks and portable enclosures.  I missed snapping up a 320 GB Verbatim unit last week at Best Buy for just $139, but I expect to see a lot more at this bargain price over the next month or so.  That company claims their 500 GB drive will start under $300, and I expect it will drop 1/3 off that price on sale right off the bat.

Where does this leave supposed bargain NAND flash drives?  They’re not looking as attractive, with even the cheapest consumer units priced over $400 for a usable 60 GB.  Until vendors start hitting massive volumes, NAND will continue to command ten times the price per GB of old fashioned “spinning rust”.  With similar power requirements, expect NAND to remain a niche product for another few years at least.

You might also want to read these other posts...

  • Electric Car Over the Internet: My Experience Buying From…
  • Running Rabbits: More About My Cloud NUCs
  • How To Connect Everything From Everywhere with ZeroTier
  • Introducing Rabbit: I Bought a Cloud!
  • Liberate Wi-Fi Smart Bulbs and Switches with Tasmota!

Filed Under: Enterprise storage, Terabyte home Tagged With: disk drives, Hitachi, LaCie, NAND, Samsung, SSD, Verbatim

Primary Sidebar

Information retrieval consists of four main stages: Identifying the exact subject of the search; Locating this subject in a guide which refers the searcher to one or more documents; Locating the documents; Locating the required information in the documents.

Douglas John Foskett

Subscribe via Email

Subscribe via email and you will receive my latest blog posts in your inbox. No ads or spam, just the same great content you find on my site!
 New posts (daily)
 Where's Stephen? (weekly)

Download My Book


Download my free e-book:
Essential Enterprise Storage Concepts!

Recent Posts

How To Install ZeroTier on TrueNAS 12

February 3, 2022

Scam Alert: Fake DMCA Takedown for Link Insertion

January 24, 2022

How To Connect Everything From Everywhere with ZeroTier

January 14, 2022

Electric Car Over the Internet: My Experience Buying From Vroom

November 28, 2020

Powering Rabbits: The Mean Well LRS-350-12 Power Supply

October 18, 2020

Tortoise or Hare? Nvidia Jetson TK1

September 22, 2020

Running Rabbits: More About My Cloud NUCs

September 21, 2020

Introducing Rabbit: I Bought a Cloud!

September 10, 2020

Remove ROM To Use LSI SAS Cards in HPE Servers

August 23, 2020

Test Your Wi-Fi with iPerf for iOS

July 9, 2020

Symbolic Links

    Featured Posts

    Infographic: Real-World Port Throughput Relative To Thunderbolt (Formerly Light Peak)

    February 21, 2011

    The Best Mac OS X Terminal Font: Glass TTY VT220

    October 6, 2015

    The 2018 iPad Pro is a Beast!

    November 9, 2018

    Generation 3 drobo: Fall In Love All Over Again

    April 9, 2015

    Sony QX100 Lens Camera: Ruined by a Flaky iOS App

    October 7, 2013

    How Fast Is It? A Storage Infographic

    October 29, 2010

    We Live in the Future: Robotic Cat Litter Boxes!

    May 8, 2010

    Why I Am Biased Against FCoE

    October 21, 2011

    Introducing Rabbit: I Bought a Cloud!

    September 10, 2020

    Electric Car Over the Internet: My Experience Buying From Vroom

    November 28, 2020

    Footer

    Legalese

    Copyright © 2022 · Log in