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[Article] Hard drives: happy 60th birthday and RIP

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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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[Article] Hard drives: happy 60th birthday and RIP Your Name <YourName@YourISP.com> - 2017-01-16 19:10 +1300

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