HDD stands for Hard Disk Drive which, in my opinion, all storage drives are hard but only one uses disks and this is what we’ll be talking about today. Most of the people that read this post know exactly what a hard drive is so I’ll save my breath and simply post this photo.
See that disk and see that little lever? Well the disks spin (usually 2-4 disks per hard drive) and the little lever moves across those disks (AKA Platters) and reads data that is stored magnetically which is why you should never put a magnet on a hard drive. Well moving parts will always have issues just like any moving part, things break, collide into each other and eventually wear out. This is the case with hard drives and the technology was invented in a time when computers were huge and they never moved for sometimes up to 20 years. Now, most of the hard drives sold are going into laptops, netbooks and even portable music players. Desktop is still high on the scale but move hard drives take a beating.
Apple’s most fail-prone music player in the iPod line was the iPod Classic. They’re full-size iPod that resembles the first iPod that was released in 2001 (8 years ago) and had a 5 gigabyte 1.8″ hard drive. The latest model has a 120 gigabyte hard drive but Toshiba makes 1.8″ drives up to 260 Gigabytes and has for a while. Apple hasn’t upgraded the device in a while and many believe the device falls dead last in sales behind all other iPod models.
I saw a video once of a guy that was at the end of his iPod warranty on the classic and decided he wanted a shiny refurbished unit to replace his scratched up model. He sat in his car, banged the iPod against the roof of his car for 5 minutes while continually restarting the iPod forcing the drive to spin up. Eventually, the iPod wouldn’t start and the hard drive was dead. I’m sure he wasn’t the only guy to do this and yeah he got a new model but Apple took a hit on that replacement and thus lost money. Flash memory which is used in every other iPod is less prone to failure and thus more cost effective to build which every company loves doing but flash memory is still very expensive.
There are music buffs like myself who have over 25 thousand songs and want to store as many as possible on our iPods and a 4-32 Gigabyte iPod storage isn’t enough. I love my 160GB iPod classic. It’s a wonderful device and holds all of my songs and even a few movies. The screen isn’t gigantic and the interface is kinda bad compared to the iPhone but the battery life goes for days and days and I know that every song in my library is on this iPod.
I don’t know the fate of the HDD but as SSD (solid state drives) and flash memory goes down in price, so will the sales of hard drives. Toshiba has already said publicly the sale of their 1.8″ drives have dipped very low and given that Apple was their largest purchaser of these drives, it only makes sense. Who knows what’s next and I never call the death of anything but SSD will take over HDDs in the next 10 years, that’s for sure.
SSD is already the storage or choice for netbooks and flash is already the choice storage for cameras, phones, PDAs and other portable consumer devices. Notebooks are slowly seeing an increase in SSD but 500GB HDDs are $150 and 256GB SSDs are over $600. This is a huge price difference. SSDs currently cost over $2 per gigabyte where HDDs are around 30 Cents. That’s a huge price increase.
The benefits of SSDs were touted as improved performance and increased battery life. Well battery life wasn’t improved AT ALL but performance did go up but this isn’t really important for people. SSDs do have the benefit of increased reliability which can mean a lot for normal users. Of course as more data is stored on the cloud, the capacity of drives won’t matter as much so HDDs will just go out of demand if SSDs can become more affordable in the 120GB market.
We’ll see how things pan out of the next 18 months but I’m sure that HDD is going to start dimishing soon and will be completely gone in 10 years. No big deal, at least the big storage makers are already moving to SSD so the companies won’t be dying, just the drives.