X-bit labs

Annual Hardware Overview: A Glance Back at the Year 2003 (page 17)

Category: Editorial

by Andy Yaschenko

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

While the manufacturers of full-size HDDs shift towards the 2.5” form-factor, the manufacturers of notebook drives are ousted to the 1.8” format. Of course, Toshiba is in the lead, proving its superiority with a 40GB 1.8” drive: 4200rpm speed and 15msec access time, but everything else is within the norm – Ultra ATA/133, 2MB buffer, and (most important!) a power consumption of only 1.4W. The company predicts the market of such drives to become worth 25 million items in 2006. Besides Toshiba, the Chinese GS Magicstore aspires for a share in it, although it has only a 4.8GB model of the 1.8” form-factor.

This capacity suits well to a 1” Microdrive: Hitachi, for instance, has a 4GB model, although mercilessly priced – just a little under $800. However, there appeared competitors in this niche that offer much more enticing prices for a megabyte. They don’t yet offer anything above 2.2-2.4GB, but the mere fact that there is competition, is nice.

Let’s also see how the 0.85” HDD form-factor proposed by Toshiba will be developing. The company targets it for mobile phones, as these devices can well use a HDD of 2-3GB capacity. And they also already use graphics chips from NVIDIA and ATI. We won’t see a ready product soon, though. Toshiba is only promising to start selling drives like that in 2005.

It is interesting that with all those records in data density and capacities, such important parameters as access time and data transfer speed are lagging behind. The only news during the past year was Western Digital’s announcement of the Raptor series – consumer HDDs with 10,000rpm spindle rotation speed. Other HDD manufacturers haven’t followed WD, though.

This is strange, since the interfaces allow higher data transfer speed. Take SerialATA II or SerialSCSI as examples. When testing their controller, Adaptec reached 5Gbit/s instead of the specified 3Gbit/s! But what can be done with such high speed? They can only continue enlarging the cache buffer more and more…

Winding up the discussion about HDDs, I would like to draw a parallel with the computer memory market. While the stagnation in the memory market resulted in a number of super-mega-extra modules, we have external drives here. There are numerous external HDDs announced last year, although the number of internal devices is smaller than usual. So, this is a way for the manufacturer to remind the public of themselves and also grope for a niche to make money in. The interfaces can suit everyone’s taste, as USB 2.0 and FireWire often come together. The trend led to NAS systems supplied as an external HDD with an Ethernet controller.

CD-RW drives have practically exhausted their growth potential, too, having stopped at 52/32/52 speeds combination. Again, we’ve got numerous external devices and CD-RW/DVD-ROM combos or CD-drives with an integrated card-reader. It is already clear that several suggestions about doubling the data density for a CD disc didn’t make it into the market: the falling prices for DVD-burners have rendered such initiatives useless.