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Loading ...Why Hard Drives Suck
combatus
I love and hate the hard drive at the moment. It’s very rare that I feel this way about a piece of hardware but I’m definitely in two minds about this magnetic storage device which has been about for what must be two decades.
Lets start with the good points. First has got to be size. Drives have increased massively in size over the last 10 years. I still remember struggling with a 1GB drive in the early/mid 90’s a time when I had to delete one game in order to fit another on the damn thing.
Then all of a sudden the storage space exploded and we now have drives 1000 times as big which are far more spacious than many people need but are still relatively cheap – you can get a 1000GB (1TB) drive for a little over £200. It’s very rare that there is an excess of performance in this industry but hard drive space is definitely one area where you don’t have to spend a fortune to get loads of headroom.
Now the downside? Downside you say? Yes this stems from the fact that there are two sides to every hard drive. There is space, and one other crucial factor – PERFORMANCE. This is something that hasn’t improved to the same extent as the space or any other factor in the average PC. In fact the speed at which hard drives can transfer data has only increased by two or three times at most in the last 10 –15 years quite appalling considering the thousand fold increase we’ve seen in other components. Modern 7200rpm drives can transfer data at an average of 50-60MB/sec and have average seek times of around 8-10ms. This is not a massive increase compared to older 5400 speed drives around 10 years ago. I don’t have a 10 year old drive to test but you only have to look at benchmarks to see how fast they were. Below is a comparison between my drive (a 1 year old 250GB Hitachi 7K250) in red and some older drives using data in the Sisoftware Sandra benchmarking system.
Yes the difference would be noticeable moving from a 10 year old drive to a Western Digital Raptor X but imagine moving from a 600Mhz Athlon that was a quick chip 10 years ago to a 2.6Ghz Intel Core2 Quad, or maybe a 16MB Creative Banshee Graphics card to an 8800 Ultra. The difference then becomes much more marked.
This lack of improvement has meant that the hard drive is a massive bottleneck and by far the slowest, most archaic component of modern PC systems despite all the bolt-ons it’s had over the last 20 years like faster spin speeds, larger caches etc etc. The consequences are that transferring files that take up just 1% of a 500GB drive’s space can leave you sitting around for several minutes in some cases. Games and other demanding programs also suffer – stuttering and startup/loading times are greatly effected as is the time taken to boot into Windows. A simple task like transferring two 500MB files at the same time requiring a drive to read and write makes everything grind to a halt.
The multitasking prowess and raw power of an Intel Quad Core processor puts these devices to shame. The technology behind Hard Drives, (using changes in magnetisations) still has plenty of headroom and we have only used a fraction of it’s speed potential. Processor technology for example has had to adopt new materials recently which allow for smaller manufacturing processes and faster, cooler chips as a result.
I don’t care how they do it, but something significant has to happen in the storage industry in the next few years, be it flash based or holographic technology. Either way I really do hope the days are numbered for the Hard Drive.
“I don’t care how they do it, but something significant has to happen in the storage industry in the next few years, be it flash based or holographic technology.”
Good Mr Combatus, you have sort of answered your own question. Flash drives are already about. Yes their small but fast but it’s a new tech. Like when HDD came out after tape. Small but fast.
Just got to wait a while for tech to mature a bit. Thats and learn to love load times. Great tea making time.
Flash is great but it’s still a fair way from where PC storage should be by now. At least it’s a new technology and as it’s already faster than your average hard drive then it can only get better which is awesome!
I think loading times are a lot like people who drive at 45 in a 50 zone on one of those long country roads - too fast to over take but slow enough to pi*s you off. Likewise loading times are never long enough to make a tea, but seem an age when you’re sitting there!
Now lets see what you’ve said in your post!
Antony
maybe you could say that the mechanical HDD was the best design of the PC which happened to be 20 years ago? such a glass half full.
the solution i already here with ssd solid state hard drives. with
- No spin up
- No seek time
- No rotational latency
- Sustained high-speed data transfers
- Can cut boot-up time in half
lower power consumption,
remarkable ruggedness,
high reliability,
less weight and outstanding performance.
but at £600 for 64gb it will be a while before it becomes a option for your average user.
tom.
Flash based memory takes longer to WRITE data than hard disks take to write data (compare the write speed of a USB 2.0 pendrive with that of a USB 2.0 hard drive and you’ll see my point), which means your games will take longer to install as the game has to wait for the flash to store the data. Also, flash is expensive. The biggest problem? Flash memory can only be written and re-written a limited number of times before it starts going bad, so you can’t use a journaling filesystem (like NTFS) to store your operating system on because the journal is being written and re-written constantly and this would wear out the drive in no time. This is why with flash, you’re stuck with using FAT32 as a filesystem, with all its limitations (64GB max volume size, 4GB max single file size, no native encryption & comprerssion etc.). Plus, you can’t buy a 1TB flash drive can you? So much for using flash for ALL your needs…
[…] 11.9 MB/s read speed, and a slower 6.7 MB/s write speed. This read speed puts it ahead of Seagate’s Pocket Drive, but behind Lexar’s Lightning Drive. It is also considerably faster than […]
I think mechanical hard disks will become a thing of the past. They are possibly the weakest part of a computer system.
I dislike optical drives even more. I recently found that out of 20 DVD discs burned, half had failures and even the discs that burned ok can develop read errors after time.
We need large capacity SS drives.
Today it also occurred to me that we could see a future where games and other applications are no longer installed by an end user but simply accessed by an advanced version of a web browser. The web browser would evolve into an application portal that goes way beyond anything we use now.
Instead of buying a game and installing, you purchase, register your details and the game runs through the web portal. The applications would still have the option to run offline of course since not everyone can depend on the internet all of the time.
The current web browser technology is far too primitive for this kind of software portal.