Storage is today's essential ingredient in personal computing. Hard drives are huge, yet requirements for capacity continue to be driven by audio and, especially, video. These are my notes on storage technologies.
Last May I discussed the new Hitachi 1TB hard drive and compared it to buying two 500GB drives. The prices have changed a lot.
The 7K1000 drive cost $450 last May and is now $320. A pair of T7K500 drives is now $240. The difference in price was 18¢/GB in May and is now a mere 8¢/GB.
There can be little doubt that both prices will continue to drop. Nonetheless, the trend is clear - the price for a single large drive is converging on the price of the two drive solution.
January 5, 2008
I am a big fan of Hitachi hard drives from a division called Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (www.hgst.com). Hitachi and IBM had a long history of cooperation in mass storage; IBM sold its assets to Hitachi some time ago. All the IBM brands like DeskStar and TravelStar are now Hitachi brands.
Hitachi does the best job of all hard disk vendors when it comes to making technical information about its drives available. The Web page for every model includes a link to a comprehensive PDF data sheet plus links to extensive mechanical and electrical reference information.
Two recent developments are worth noting.
The first is a 200GB, 7200rpm laptop drive, the 7K200. I'd buy one today, but my venerable Thinkpad T30 requires a PATA drive; the 7K200 family is strictly SATA. Nevertheless, this is a breakthrough laptop drive in terms of capacity and performance. The only negative is that Hitachi's SATA drives seem to require about 15% more power than the same drive with a PATA interface. I currently use a 7K100 drive in my T30 and although it's very spacious, I keep much archive material offline. With double the capacity, I wouldn't have to. The drive is very new; I can't find it for sale yet.
The other news has to do with an older model drive, the T7K500. Hitachi recently unveiled the 7K1000, a SATA-only 1TB drive. This drive is obviously a milestone in capacity but it is also somewhat expensive at $450 (45¢/GB). Meanwhile, the price of the T7K500 is falling, with today's price at ZipZoomfly.com a mere $134 for the SATA model. That means you can have 1TB in two drives for $268, just 27¢ per GB.
It was about 15 years ago when I purchased my first 500MB drive for the then astonishing price of $500, or $1,000 per GB.
May 17, 2007