Well, speed is expensive. It's not so much just putting a more powerful motor in there to spin the platters faster. The read/write heads must be more sensitive, much more accurate. They also need to be engineered to fly stably above the rotating platters without getting upset by turbulence and crashing into the platters. Needless to say, the platters have to be toughened to withstand any head crashes or landings. Everything inside the drive also needs to withstand higher temperatures from the motor, friction of air on the spinning platter, etc. To save on cost and increase reliability, you can increase tolerances... fly the heads higher up, space out the bits, etc. All that mean lower capacities.
High performance never comes cheap. Applies to many other things, including cars. To go fast, everything has to be tough, and more reliable than usual.
I thinkh that the storage industry will have to think of something new and reliable in this industry! Soon they are going to release 1Tb drivers, but I don't know if it's going to be good, since if something happens to your hard-drive.... 1Tb of data goes to waste!! Not to mention that recovery is getting paid by 1Mb Hopefully SSD drives in the future will be more reliable and faster as IDE/SCSI drives.
Actually, Hitachi has already released a 1TB drive. Fortunately, hard drives these days are very reliable. Quite unlike the infamous IBM Deathstar days. Well, SSD drives are faster than hard drives in seek and start-up. They are also very much more shock-proof than hard drives. But AFAICS, they will never be as cost-effective as hard drives, not by a long shot.
Adrian: I know that discs are now reliable much more then before (like you've said - famous Deathstar series... and not to mention a couple of Maxtor's also But as long as there are magnetic parts inside the drive, there's a change disk will go to heaven. It's only a matter of time, few weeks or few years. Luckily all of those newer motherboards nowdays have integrated RAID chipsets, so it's easy and cheap to configure RAID field. As far as it goes for reliability, here's rather interesting article from google itself! http://www.engadget.com/2007/02/18/massive-google-hard-drive-survey-turns-up-very-interesting-thing/ Direct link to pdf: http://216.239.37.132/papers/disk_failures.pdf I'm off now, and won't be here on forums for weekend, so I'll reply later to any posts..
now i looking for a reliable 2.5" hdd for my laptop, the 100gb juz died, along with all the data, dunno gonna cost how much $$$ to recover sia... =(
Damn.. That sucks. That's why it's important to keep backing up our data. You can either try the Momentus 5400.3 - http://www.techarp.com/showarticle.aspx?artno=302&pgno=0 or the Momentus 7200.1 - http://www.techarp.com/showarticle.aspx?artno=262&pgno=0
i did backup some, but... aiya cant afford 160gb nor a 7200rpm ones... looking for a mid-range 5400pm 80~100gb to replace
Well, the Momentus 5400 series are 5400 RPM drives. Of course, there are other 5400 RPM hard drives. Just pick the most cost-effective one.
cost effective ah.. i juz want one that's RELIABLE, cant afford haf another similar incident... mine was a samsung HM100JC anyway
Well, the thing is hard drive reliability is only one aspect of overall reliability. IMHO, current notebook hard drives are more likely to die of abuse, than actual drive failure.
