Todays Storage: Western Digital

[elec999]

Western Digital being my favorite hard drive brand, seems left behind. Will they have newer raptors, or go to 750gig hard drives. Whats the deal with all the different models KS, RE2. Does RE2 actually make a difference. Do you think we will some further price drops in hard drive pricing.
Thanks

 

[Neural Net]

Well at the moment they seem to have some of the best deals for drives 250GB-500GB with 16MB Caches.

 

[ancalime]

I think hard drives in general need to have more technological advances. I mean look at the rapid advancements of things like the CPU, GPU, RAM, etc.. Hard drives aren't getting no love!

Western Digital isn't getting left behind by no means, I don't think...

 

[elec999]

I wish that some other companies started releasing ram based drives, for super highspeed.
Thanks

 

[doublejack]

IMO, the the drive industry has stagnated. 10 to 15 years ago, drives were not only getting bigger, but also faster and at a continual pace. I would say the capacity used to double every 12 to 18 months. Not anymore. Drives are still growing, but at a much, much slower pace. And I think they've picked up next to no speed in the past 3-4 years. Any gains have basically come from bigger cache sizes.

So never fear, it's not just WD. It's the whole industry that is lagging.

 

[Neural Net]

Lol guys it's all well saying that HD technology is lagging behind CPUs, but the fact is that HDs remain the only mechanical part of a computer needed to run anything, and Ram prices are far too expensive to use as storage. In fact, price performance wise, HDs are far superior to Ram based drives.

 

[youngbuck]

There is some serious R&D going on in the Storage industry. In the not too distant future we will see HDDs that have large amounts of flash memory on them which will provide almost instant boots. There are already small flash hard drives out, but I don't know much about them, and I think they have some drawbacks that are currently being worked out (like a limited number of read, write, and rewrite operations on the disk). They are also working on holographic storage methods that will be much faster and hold much larger amounts of space. Can't wait for this stuff to come out.

 

[Neural Net]

Yes well flash memory just happens to be slow. The mistake which many fall into is believing that flash drives will be faster than conventional HDs, not true. This is only the case with Ram based drives, and Ram has now been made which stores its state via a battery when it is not powered, but as I said earlier, it is still far too expensive to replace anything yet, the same goes for any alternative. The hybrid drives were primarily designed for laptops to preserve battery life, and increase performance in that measure, not with speed.

 

[Alien1099]

http://www.ocforums.com/showthread.php?t=467286
http://www.ocforums.com/showthread.php?t=467656

I posted these a while back. They might be worth a look.

Biotech and Carbon Nano Tubes are some VERY exciting and promising fields of science.

 

[Neural Net]

Interestingly people are wary of large HDs or any storage medium that offers huge space within one solution. Those in a place to buy a 500GB HD will often, at least consider 2 250GBs instead, and I have had HDs fail on me in the past. I wish somehow storage really would be reliable and fast, all this storage increase is good progress but when it is just as likely to fail as a regular smaller HD, more is at risk.