X-bit labs

Annual Hardware Overview: A Glance Back at the Year 2003 (page 16)

Category: Editorial

by Andy Yaschenko

[ 01/08/2004 | 11:51 PM ]

Optical and Hard Disk Drives

At a perfunctory glance, the main topic of the past year in the hard disk drive market was about the transition from Ultra ATA/133 to SerialATA. In fact, it is a very strange transition: it is still not clear if it has happened already or not. On the second thought, this may be a sign of an ideal smooth change of the standard when you cannot pin a point and say this day we all used Ultra ATA/133 and the next day we all used SerialATA. And there is one more transition ahead – to SerialATA II. And that is going to be also slow. This interface will show its strength in the current year already, while the year 2003 saw only prototypes of 3.5” and 2.5” SerialATA drives.

On a deeper level, the last year was about the increasing data density per platter and its consequences. To be precise, the data density has been increasing since 2002.

In 2003, they discovered that a combination of cobalt with platinum wafers increases the energy of magnetic anisotropy that directly affects the data density, in hundreds times. Hitachi announced a technology that’s going to boost HDD capacities by about hundred times by the year 2010. In other words, we will have consumer drives of a few terabytes capacity. By the way, Hitachi, in cooperation with Maxell, also announced a technology to create optical disks of the standard 5.25” diameter and of 1 terabyte capacity somewhere around 2007. But that’s rather not about hard disks.

As for the off-the-shelf products, the manufacturers were all busy with product series on 80GB platters. Theoretically, they could offer us 480GB HDDs in 2003 already. They didn’t, because hard disk drives, just like processors, have outpaced the current level of the software and the users’ requirements. What would a user need a 0.5TB HDD for? And there are 100GB platters approaching. The Barracuda 7200.7 200GB on such platters is already selling. Characteristically, Seagate used only two platters. The reason is simple: we don’t need more.

No wonder then, that reducing the platter diameter while keeping the same storage capacities becomes the most urgent topic. For example, 2.5” HDDs of 60-80GB capacities is an ordinary item in the product list of any notebook hard disk drives manufacturer. And parameters of such products match those of “grown-up” models: 5400-7200rpm spindle rotation speed, 2-8MB buffer and so on.

Add the Nano ITX form-factor and the RADEON 9800 with passive cooling…Yes, for the Centrino platform, the performance of the HDD should be no worse than that of an ordinary 3.5” drive. By the way, in the end of the year, Fujitsu showcased the prototype of a 2.5” HDD with the Serial ATA II interface. These are all parts of the same picture, just like Seagate’s release of its 2.5” Momentus family and Western Digital’s intention to get to production of 2.5” models. Hitachi has been manufacturing them for a long time (the Travelstar series was inherited from IBM). There is only Maxtor left.