XPost: comp.sys.mac.misc, comp.sys.mac.vintage

From one of today's junk emails from a mostly-Windoze website ...

The hard drive is 60 years old!
-------------------------------
This year marks the 60th anniversary of the magnetic
hard drive - but it also marks the beginning of the
hard drive¹s demise. This month Mark Williams looks
at why hard disk drives are finally getting the boot.

Image of early hard drive:
<http://i.nextmedia.com.au/Features/ibm350.jpg>

Hard disk drives (HDD) have been around seemingly
forever, since the 1950s in fact. That¹s right, over
sixty years of the same storage medium. When you
think about it that¹s quite a feat in and of itself.
Data tapes have been around longer (by about five
years) and are still used in the corporate scene for
backups and cold storage, but they¹ve been long gone
in the consumer¹s eyes.

HDDs have served us well, offering reasonable storage
speeds and good capacities for many a decade. I
remember my first hard drive, 20GB in size it seemed
it was massive, leaving me wondering why anyone would
need a drive so spacious. These days that¹s merely a
single game or a beefy DLC patch.

HDDs have their fair share of problems though. Being
a mechanical device they¹re susceptible to shocks and
impacts and can contribute to vibrations in the
chassis which doesn¹t help them, or your ears.

Then there¹s the bit rot, motor failures, head
crashes and fragmentation.

When processors, memory and bandwidth speeds started
to rise, HDDs started to get left behind. So bigger
caches were included and spindle speeds were
ratcheted up paving the way for the likes of the
famous Western Digital Raptor with 10,000rpm spindle
speeds.

When even that wasn¹t enough we threw them into RAID0
arrays to literally throw more read heads at the
problem. My four 80GB HDDs way back when in RAID0 had
beastly performance, it was glorious, and noisy! But
there¹s only so much you can do with a spinning metal
platter. There¹s physical limits on spinning it and
there¹s only so much you can cram onto it. Although to
be fair Seagate and Western Digital et al. have been
doing a good job of improving areal density year on
year, even coming up with techniques like shingled
storage to improve densities (at the cost of
performance).

However, we¹re now at a tipping point. HDDs are so far
behind the performance curve these days compared to
SSDs that it¹s just a question of SSD capacity and
dollars per gigabyte, and it appears that time is now.

Just about all PCs you can buy now have an SSD in it,
at the very least as the OS drive with a slave HDD to
bring the needed extra capacity. However in the top
end where you can drop a bit more coin for the
privilege you can get capacious amounts of SSD only
storage included.

With this trend continuing it¹s only a matter of time,
perhaps less than a year, before SSD-only PCs become
the norm.

<http://mobile.pcauthority.com.au/Feature/447662,system-news-the-hard-dr ive-is-60-years-old.aspx>

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