MalVeauX

Heya,

The cache makes no difference. Thing is, you won't hardly notice a truly faster drive during normal usage on a drive in a lot of circumstances. Noticing the difference is cache is simply not going to happen without millisecond benchmarks--which all pretty much so that cache after a certain point just doesn't matter anymore. It's just there as a way to say "something is bigger, thus better." Untrue. But a lot of people are surface readers and will just take it at face value. 64mb of cache sound great. It's pointless though beyond marketing strategy.

As for everyone saying to just RAID up several cheaper drives, sure, everyone knows this already. The point is to have 2TB taking up a single drive space and not 2 or 3 drive spaces for the same storage capacity. You obviously don't get this drive for performance. It's raw storage with a smaller foot print.

The current 2TB drive out is ok. It's $300. I can get 1TB for $89 or so now. Obviously I get more for my money in the 1TB. But, it would take more space to use more drives. More power. More channels. Or just think more components and resource. Over time, it's more efficient to have less of this stuff and just have one larger drive. We're heading there. When the 2TB drives drop in price, I'll be happy. It needs to truly be closer to the 250 mark instead of 300 at this point though. It's not like it's new tech or hard to produce. They're just milking the fact that they had their 2TB on the shelf first. It's not worth it's price tag. When everyone catches up, competition will bring the cost down to what it should be. And that's when I'll soak up a bunch of cheaper 1TB drives as folk rush on the cheaper 2TB drives.

Very best,

darksuffering

+1, its funny we argue about stuff like this and 2-3 years we will probably argue about 10Tb HD's.

As for me I can appreciate 1 single 2tb drive, though filling it might be an issue

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WeirdSexy

does anyone know any kind of theoretical wall that we would reach with 3.5" HDDs, i mean is 10TB really possible? I have a computer around here somewhere with a 20GB hard drive, its only like 7 years old, we had one from the 90's with like 8GB HDD. Crazy stuff man, i have about 1.5TB worth of data next to me right now.

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MalVeauX

Heya,

Honestly, they could have released larger capacity disks long ago. It's just called market creep. Why give a monster 10TB drive to the public and skip making money off the 1tb, 2tb, 3tb, 4tb, 5tb, 6tb, .... etc. Money. I doubt we'll even care about a 10TB spindle based drive at this point. SSD is coming so fast and capacity increasing so fast that we'll start seeing larger capacity climb even faster. The moving-part-HDD will pretty much be a dead tech. It'll be a good number of years of course. But it's coming.

As for storage space, I keep digital copies of all my media (DVDs). I have hundreds of DVDs backed up in ISO form for my home theater. I use multi-terabytes of storage. I'm the kind of audience that likes big huge drives. Less drives = less foot print, less resource, less heat, less noise, etc. And to give you an idea, I increase my storage needs by about 24 DVD discs per month for my my movies alone, that doesn't account for all the other stuff I gather up too, that's just my home theater alone. I eat HDD space up fast. So I like the idea of bigger drives, because I eat up these 1TB drives rather quickly.

Very best,

SyncMaster753

They couldnt produce drives with 10TB capacity and still fit into the 3.5" form factor. they are limited by platter density

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Varjo

I do however know that any difference in speed you noticed was not due to increases in cache size. There is a lot of data to back that up. End of story. I was attempting to provide other reasons you may have noticed a speed increase. Anyway, don't feel bad, lots of people are ignorant of what's important in a hdd. Why do you think they make such a big deal about cache? To attract all the ill informed people, such as yourself, to buy their new product.

On topic:
Magnetic HDDs are also limited by reliability of magnetic drives. Size is growing faster than reliability, after a point, it becomes probable that your drive will fail before you fill it...

I wouldn't trust a non Raided (for redundancy) 10tb drive. This is one place SSDs (once they are much much much cheaper) will eventually have an advantage when looking at monster drives.

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T3h_Ch33z_Muncha

That's how they increased from 2GB to 2TB in the same form factor, right?

Areal density is always making advances - i think the current top is 500GB in a 3.5" platter.

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DuckieHo

Do you understand how hard drives or benchmark works? Did you use the exact same hard drive to compare 16MB and 32MB cache? Did you? Hmmmmmmmmmm!?!?!?!?!? Off the top of my head, there was only one series that had a 32MB and 16MB of the same exact drive.... 7200.10.

It is possible. The next generation of disk technology uses thermal expansion. It heats the platter underneath the head to expand usable area. This tech has been in research for a few years now and I'm surprised we haven't seen commercial usage yet. When I heard about it 2 years ago, the researchers seemed like that the tech was ready to go...

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darksuffering

im all for SSD to be the new standards but as long as they have crappy wal-mart computers HDD will stay. Like MalVeauX it is a market creep, they probably have prototypes for 4gb or maybe not? idk

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Cheetos316

Is this getting closer to the hybrid HDs that we were supposed to see? I remember reading a while back that hybrid HDDs + SSDs would be the next big thing for file storage.

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