X-bit labs

December 2003 Hardware News Overview (page 15)

Category: Editorial

by Andy Yaschenko

[ 12/19/2003 | 05:36 PM ]

Hard Disk Drives and Optical Drives

We have only trends in this area. Due to increased data densities, hard disk drives are shrinking in size (at least, there are ever more small-size HDDs available). The platter capacity is growing accordingly. The rotational speed remaining the same, the data access time is growing, too. The read/write head passes one degree of the circle in the same time, but has to deal with more data.

So it’s no wonder November events were mostly concerned with 1.8” HDDs (not even the 2.5” ones!). Well, it is of course a sort of visual artifact or coincidence – nobody else offered anything else. Anyway, this is a trend as not only technology is moving this way, but also the demand: notebooks, barebone systems, and consumer electronics like digital VCRs.

As for the products proper, Toshiba showed up with its 1.8” drives of “grown-up” capacities (20 and 40GB). The rest of characteristics are quite normal, too. Consider: 4200rpm spindle rotation speed, 15ms seek time, ATA-5 interface, 2MB buffer. Add a power consumption of 1.4W.

Moreover, Toshiba is planning to increase the production volume of its 1.8” series in the next year from 300 to 600 products monthly, by making arrangements with other manufacturers. The company estimates the market of 1.8” HDDs at 25 million items in 2006. Interestingly, the China-located GS Magicdrive has scheduled about the same production volume of 1.8” drives for 2006. In other words, the Chinese are going to have close to 100% of the market (owned by Toshiba so far). They are unlikely to do it, but may make up a good competitor anyway.

There’s one more promising technical innovation. Agere Systems, a major provider of HDD logics, cooperated with Maxtor on developing a chip to combine all the logic functions necessary for a regular hard disk drive. So the controller circuit board may now carry only this single chip and the chips of the cache memory, thus reducing the energy requirements, cost and dimensions of the product. Of course, Maxtor’s HDDs will be the first to feature the innovation, and this company is not yet targeting the small-size drives market.

That’s all about the dimensions, let’s now mention the other important characteristic – speed. There’s also a new chip, from Adaptec. November, the company tested its Serial Attached SCSI controller to see that the speed reached far beyond the specified 3GB/s notching 5GB/s. There’s only one question: whether this interface is destined to live, considering the inroads made by the Serial ATA interface.

Optical drives are still coming with either ATA/133 (internal) or USB 2.0 (external) interfaces. The last month was rich for optical drive news. First of all, a new generation of DVD-R drives has arrived to burn both DVD-R and DVD+R disks at 8x speed, twice faster than the mainstream products of today. I won’t even cite the names of the companies to offer the innovation as it is long enough to include even Cyberdrive and MSI that usually don’t go for innovations among the first.

Pioneer DVD-A07