back to article Seagate tells flash bigots to get real

Disk drive vendor Seagate has issued a document that tells flash evangelists to get real – there is no way flash will kick disk drives out of notebook storage for many years to come. The pdf document is called "NAND Flash: Can It Meet the Growing StorageCapacity Demands of the LaptopPC Market?" and it's short enough to …

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  1. Craig 2

    False logic

    As somebody who sees a lot of laptops for repair etc, the vast majority of them only use a tiny amount of their storage. Most have 20-40gb of data and the rest is wasted space. Just that adjustment alone makes a huge difference to their maths, if only consumers didn't see capacity figures as `bigger=better`.

    I'll bet if PC World sold identical laptops, one with 500gb 2.5" drive and one with a 60gb SSD, that most people would see the numbers and still go with the 500gb. In reality if they wanted a laptop for the most common uses (net, email, facebook) the flash version would be much more useful in real-world usage.

    1. PsychicMonkey
      Thumb Up

      agree

      the only reason laptop disks are gettig bigger is that it is now cheaper to put a big disk in it. people see the bigger size and think "gosh this must be better because it's bigger", I for see something inbetween, where there is a SSD for the OS and programs area, and another "standard" disk for storage, that'd get my vote.

    2. big_D Silver badge

      Agree

      My last laptop had 80GB and I never used half. My current one has 500GB and I think I have used under 50GB so far.

      The same goes for our company laptops, the have 250 - 350GB hard drives, but most use only a couple of GB for data.

      With the move to the cloud and data centralised on servers, the requirements for individual user devices is going to shrink.

      Most of our users have Windows Terminals on their desks, no local storage at all, just a 2GB flash drive to boot from - and most of that is empty!

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      title

      I took the hard disk out of my netbook and put a SSD in. The battery lasts 50% longer, and 32GB is more than enough for email, web-browser, and the occasional presentation.

    4. Ammaross Danan
      Boffin

      Close

      "Spending $10 billion2 to buy 4 per cent of notebook storage market share, or $2 billion in revenue, is not viable"

      This statement is the one I take issue with. Why? It doesn't seem to factor in retail value. With 2.5" spindles going for $0.10/GB, and SSDs going for $1.90/GB, That's a 1900% increase! [(0.1*(1900*0.01)) if you want to do the math] Their $2bn is the capitalization of spindles by storage capacity sold. If laptops were stuffed with similarly-cheap spindle drives, then yes, $2bn would be an accurate guess. However, SSD-equiped laptops wouldn't be bottom-barrel laptops, but performance-oriented laptops (dual drive perhaps?) and netbooks with next-to-no capacity (16GB perhaps?). The performance or midrange laptops would likely be (optionally) stuffed with 64-120GB drives in lieu of 500GB counterparts. Each one of these supplantings would, at the least, cost 2x the drive they're replacing (if you do the math, that's a 64GB(ish) in place of those 500GB drives, and a 16GB in the netbook sub-200GB single-platter replacements), which would net them a minimum of $4bn by supplanting $2bn of normal platter data. If these numbers are profit margins vs cost, rather than actual sales, then the numbers swing even more favorably toward NAND. So, 2.5yrs for a $10bn fab, then ice cream and cake afterwards? Sounds like a good investment....oh wait? Isn't that why so many manufacturers are jumping the bandwagon and DOUBLING (nearly) the NAND output in 1 year? Yeah, thought so.

  2. Robert E A Harvey

    Fascinating

    During the 1920s the LNER was investigating high speed trains, and the germans had a high speed diesel railcar and the swiss had some very clever electric technology.

    Because the infrastructure was there and they were familiar with the manufacturing they rejected both alternatives and built the A4 streamliners. Ten years later Mallard went on to break the steam speed record, and steam traction remained king until the middle 1950s.

    Now, in the 21st century, no-one would consider even diesel for high speed operations, and electric is everywhere. Steam is for hobbyists and museums. And yet, Mallard remains magnificent.

    The comparison with hard disks? Well, given that the life of a railway locomotive is between 20 and 60 years, we are around 3-4 generations on from the decision not to buy the flying hamburger. What will storage look like in 3-4 generations? How long is a generation? 3 years?

    Hard disks are cruising into their Mallard era, but the future won't stop there.

    Predicting the future is easy. Getting it right is nearly impossible.

    1. The BigYin

      @R.E. Harvey

      "in the 21st century, no-one would consider even diesel for high speed operations,"

      Apart from the UK, which is why the lines are not all electrified

      1. Stumpy

        There, corrected that for ya...

        Apart from the UK, which doesn't have high speed rail...

        1. Yag

          No high speed rail in UK?

          What about British Rail Class 373/TGV TMST, AKA Eurostars?

        2. Frank Bough
          WTF?

          HST?

          What's that mean, then?

  3. Rajiv Dhir

    Seagate should get real

    agreed. However it does boil down to price sensitivity. Currently a cheap notebook HD is maybe £25-£35 + VAT. An SSD of reasonable capacity ie 120GB is still £100. On a £380 notebook that's about a 20% uplift in price. When it comes down to 120GB = 5% uplift, then I think HD don't stand a chance. That uplift will speed up the laptop enormously, and is worth while as a speed upgrade rather than a "capacity downgrade".

    My view is that while most people can live with 60GB it is a little tight, 120GB is easy to live with and can hold as many games, photos and as much iTunes music as most people are likely to need given current compression techniques (AAC, JPG, MP3) . So when 120GB flash drives cost £50 then HDD guys should get worried. Either that or they need to that bit torrent is shut down.

    The capacity demand in laptops is driven by HDD guys building denser disks, the cost of a platter remains fixed.

    1. Captain Obvious
      Stop

      Here is the SSD catch

      There are known issues with small files and multimedia files stored on the SSD with the sandforce controller.

      For instance:

      1) Performance degrades over time - some recommendations are to low level format the device and reload the O/S to get your speed back

      2) To achieve 275 mb/s, the files must be uncompressed

      3) Based upon #2, video, picture, zip, etc files will be read at 150 mb/s It also contributes to issue #1 with SSD performance degradation

      4) Using a SWAP file with these will clearly shorten the life of any SSD

      5) There are also issues with small files, etc.

      Your best bet is the O/S on a small SSD and your data files, temp files, SWAP files location on a regular hard drive. This is currently the optimal solution. Would have liked to see Seagate to this type of comparison...

  4. Steven Jones

    Not sure about the analysis

    I can quite easily see that for large areas of the market, SSDs will displace hard drives. The statement about how much installed capacity there is on laptops rather implies that all that space is required. That might well be so for personal users who want to keep lots of bulky multi-media files(video and, to a lesser extent, photos being the obvious ones. Also, some games are incredibly bulky. However, these requirements are far from common in the business field. In general, the storage requirments for business documents, spreadsheets and the like are far lower than for what you find in domestic usage (with a few exceptions of course). In business, the important issues are often about productivity, speed to boot, battery life, robustness, reliability and weight. Time spent in booting machines, starting programs, applying updates not to mention support staff all costs money. In the case of my company, data is synchronised with central storage, and there is considerably impetus to reduce duplication with single-instancing and keep distributed data volumes to reasonable levels. The combined system and data partition on my worktop PC is just 64GB and is only half full (albeit that there is a hidden rebuild partition).

    So, to equate installed capacity with market penetration is surely not the right metric here. That the majority of installed capacity will be on HDD is surely going to be true for a long time. The same might not be the case when measured by value or installed units.

    From a personal perspective, I gave up using a laptop for my photos and video storage and processing long ago. I have a laptop, but it's not got much data on it. The bulk of data is serviced centrally, where I can properly protect it. The laptop is turning into not much more than an access device and 128GB is ample, and I could probably cope with 64GB compared to the 2.5TB I have on my central storage. What I need from the laptop is that it starts fast and runs on battery for a long time. I do not want it for bulk storage. In many ways domestic households will echo business practice in this respect with centralised storage and, for heavyweight work, processing.

  5. The First Dave
    Boffin

    untitled

    "Laptop users want more capacity, not less"

    But at what price? They also want faster machines, so at some price point, the speed of flash will overtake the size of HD as the most important factor.

    There is also the question of when the tablet/slate form factor will overtake...

  6. {¯`·.¸_LÅMߤ¥_¸.·´¯}

    Obsolescence never meant the end of anything—it's just the beginning.

    @Robert Harvey

    Are you saying that the HDD is becoming obsolete? Is it the king is dead long live the king?

    HDD are not becoming obsolete, in fact they are becoming ever more advanced, it truly is amazing the tech involved. CPUs talk about nm, HDDs deal in Angstroms (a simplification I know but its true). Just because it is an electromechanical device, it is definitly not cruising into the Mallard era.

    SSD in laptops will be niche and stay so for a very long time, (hopefully not too long for the wear levelling to cripple the available capacity:))

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    in denial

    As cragi2 says, most people have only a few files on their laptop. 64/128GB SSD islready pretty affordable and prices of SSD are continuing to drop in line with moore's law if not faster. more sophisticated users who manage large music/photo/movie libraries are increasingly likely to move to NAS or server arrangements as they want to acces these from multiple devices nowadays

    I am not by any means a compulsive gadget buyer but after finally justifying to myself the purchage of a SSD laptop, i would never go back to a hard disk one.

    I reckon the cost of hard disks will make them viable for server based storage for another 10 years or so, but for laptops they are already on the way out.

    1. TeeCee Gold badge

      ....and in other rivers too.

      Apart from the "do you need that much space?" thing, there's another rather more important point where SSDs have the win for mobile devices.

      Regardless of the fancy G-shock detection cobblers on your rotating disk*, which one are you more likely to be able to get the data off when you drop the sodding thing on the floor?

      *Fat lot of bloody good *that* did too.......

    2. Frank Bough
      Stop

      Why buy a small SSD?

      ..when Segate will sell you a hybrid Momentus XT for less? I have a 500GB/4GB notebook model right now and am hotly anticipating something like a 3TB/8GB desktop version in the not-too-distant. A hybrid is perfect for a single drive system.

  8. Charlie Clark Silver badge

    What if...

    Seagate is probably right in assuming that if current trends continue then SSD has a nearly impossible job of playing catch up with magnetic storage. And it's not as if magnetic storage is staying still, though investment in volatile magnetic storage may decrease.

    However, will we continue to demand ever more storage of our portable devices? Music libraries probably max out at about 200GB but good synching means that most people are probably happy with a lot less on any single device as long as they have good access to the library. Video is, of course, what is driving demand for both capacity and mobility as the tablets become the PMPs we've always wanted and, thus, displace notebooks bought for this purpose. Even 64GB is going to look skimpy for a PMP when you take the kids on holiday. Do you hold out for more onboard storage or take 4TB disk-based library with you? Then, of course, there is network-based storage which is bound to become more popular as fast and affordable mobile networks become spread, though I suspect take up will be far from universal.

    This may well mean that demand for notebooks slows or even decreases. Business users may start favouring speed over capacity (witness the popularity of the Macbook air in some circumstances). Reduced growth in demand and changing priorities will have a significant effect on the industry but the report is probably true to claim that the investment required to replace magnetic storage with SSD is too great for it to happen and additional SSD capacity will largely feed the demand for "other devices". It would take some kind of technological change which either greatly decreased the costs of SSD production (plastic chips) or another form of storage entirely comes along. In the meantime Seagate is probably right to pursue the Momentum strategy which promises the best of both worlds.

    I've just replaced a nearly full 250GB, 5400 rpm drive with a 500GB, 7200rpm Momentum (4GB SSD and 32 MB cache) and performance is noticeably better even with the problems OS X 10.6 seems to have with concurrent drive access.

  9. {¯`·.¸_LÅMߤ¥_¸.·´¯}

    Fragmentation and cheap mlc v expensive slc

    320GB on a laptop drive is fine and dandy but as data is spread across the drive it gets pretty clunky when you start to fill it past 250GB or so. Thus I suggest even more capacity is required, I cant wait for 500GB per platter.

    On the business v home user front, I am a road warrior myself and I use loads of storage for business files as well as movies/tunes/pics for when I'm away from home. Granted, the IT dept are a stingy lot and they don't want to pay for large drives, but actual users want it. I read somewhere that it was becoming common for people to use there own tech at work (work would subsidise it) as consumer tech was becoming savvy enough for business use, and IT depts dont have to service it!)

    On the SSD side, if you want all the benefits you really need SLC = expensive, and even less mfg capacty than Seagate suggested. MLC just doesnt cut the mustard and degrades in performance over time and usage.

    1. Frank Bough
      FAIL

      I'm sorry,

      did you just say you were a ROAD WARRIOR? :-D

  10. Graeme 7
    FAIL

    But I wanted a flying car!

    What a load of rubbish. All this says is that because no one has a flying car, they would be more expensive than a regular car, then nobody wants them either.

    If if is too expensive to create flash then why does it exist at all! It is all just smoke, shadows and disinformation.

    The general public just buy what they are told to (mostly according to price) and at the moment they are told to buy hard disks because they are cheaper. Give it a couple of years and that might not be such a difference. So I hope they are planning the infrastructure to cope with that demand because whoever does will win. But then again maybe they think the cloud will be doing it all by then (not in the next 10 years unless connectivity dramatically improves overnight)

  11. Bruno Girin

    Numbers

    How much of the HDD capacity increase is due to the fact that the *default* capacity available when you buy a new laptop keeps increasing, irrespective of whether customers actually need more space or not? What laptop comes with less than a 250GB HDD these days?

    Then how much is due to the fact that very few people today have actually used a laptop with an SSD and therefore don't appreciate the difference? You only find SSD options in high-end business or premium laptops that the average consumer won't buy (or wont' even find at PCWorld & co). Once the technology starts being available in consumer laptops, customers will be able to compare the technology with the incumbent and make a choice.

    When I swapped my laptop's HDD for an SSD, the increase in performance was like buying a new machine altogether. So as far as I'm concerned, my next laptop will have an SSD as I reckon the gain in performance is worth the additional expense. Of course, YMMV and if you mainly want capacity then go for an HDD option.

  12. The BigYin

    Gimme...

    ...a small SSD for the OS and apps (8gb is ample) and a small-ish HDD for swap and data (32gb is more than enough). Heck, this could probably be done in one combined unit.

    Ultra-fast boot and response, room to store stuff without worrying about the NAND wearing out.

    You can't run Windows in this config, but who wants that bloated turd on their netbook?

    1. Frank Bough
      FAIL

      Seagate

      Momentus XT.

  13. DS 1

    Hmm

    I went and did a bit of check up.

    My conclusions on this is as follows:-

    SSD failure rates are actually quite high, in a general sense around the middle mark for HD failure rates based on spindle drives (2.5%-7.5% return rate across a range).

    SSD drives still have failure rates that happen in heavy write operations, no matter how they try to package the MTBF or the wear levelling.

    One of the primary reasons I'd consider SSD is within the confines of a lower failure rate against HDs. My digging tends to indicate that failure rates on at least first and second gen drives are perhaps an achilles heel to this issue. If SSD failure rates are not better than HD, then part of the reason for their selection isn't panning out

  14. Flocke Kroes Silver badge

    Consumers will catch on eventually

    I switched to SSD over a year ago, and I will not switch back. Flash might wear out on an extremely busy server, but on a desktop or laptop the massively improved performance does not show any signs fading. /proc/diskstats tells me I need to increase disk writes by a factor of a hundred before I should think about buying a spare SSD.

    I am sure ignorance and FUD will keep magnetic disks in laptops for two or three more years. Many consumers have noticed that they do not need an 8 core 4GHz CPU to browse the web. Eventually they will spot that they are only using about 50GB of their 250GB disks, and that if they switch to SSD they get a much more responsive computer at the expense of capacity they would never use.

    My magnetic discs are for a video server and for backups. If Seagate want to sell more magnetic disks, they should open an online shop so I can buy films for download.

  15. Anonymous Coward
    FAIL

    Average user

    While we all say "We don't need that much capacity" what we seam to be forgetting is we are not average users. The average users is terrible at knowing what they need in terms of computers. So, quad-core 8GB ram 500gb HDD...yeah I need that for FB and email.

    I recently over heard someone talking about how their laptop had 4gb, so did their brothers but their dad only had 3gb and they where ribbing him for it....the fact that not one of them would ever get close to using that RAM with itunes and firefox doesn't matter, two of them laughed at the dad and he got annoyed.

  16. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Up

    Digitize!

    Err didn't we go through all this with Kodak and film and digital camera's.

    A digital camera will never be better than film :-)

  17. {¯`·.¸_LÅMߤ¥_¸.·´¯}
    Stop

    digitize?

    The camera analogy is wrong. ssd will not replace hdd and isnt necessarily better tech.

  18. MrT

    Look at who wrote the report...

    Most *good* SSDs are being built by established memory manufacturers/resellers. A typical SSD offering from an established disk vendor like Seagate or Western Digital is getting knocked about in performance terms by stuff from Crucial, G.Skil or OCZ. Until they dramatically shift in operational capacity, this sort of report from a long-time manufacturer of spinning disk tech sounds like it's more about calming the shareholders.

    There's mileage in HDD tech yet, mind, but perhaps in devices that are not designed to be portable (desktops, servers, NAS etc) - for portable devices, there has already been a shift to solid-state of one form or another over the last decade (ask yourself how long ago did anyone fit an IBM 1" microdrive to their DSLR instead of CompactFlash - and then think how long ago CF was nudged aside in many devices for SD-RAM and then MicroSD).

    If there is a choice of tech on SATA, PATA, etc, and they are all 'invisible' to the system once past the interface, then in most non-portable uses spinning-disk won't lose out until the price-per-GB differential reverses. Portable use brings it's own more pressing needs of power draw and durability - there is a definite price placed on these in most users' heads and so the point at which the cost of SSD becomes acceptable has much less to do with price-per-GB.

  19. MikeSM

    Self-serving denial

    Lots of great comments so far so I won't repeat what's already been said.

    Here's my unqualified assessment:

    People's perception of reliability rather than the factual numbers will be more important. Laptop sales will probably peak in the next few years and the manufacturers are going to need a strategy to move them. It's very easy for a marketing department to make the argument that fewer moving parts = increased reliability. And the public will buy it.

    As fas as manufacturing capacity, it's probably a non-issue. If there's a market for it, China will find a way to do it. Cheap.

    For actual storage capacity, I concede that the trend has been more. However as others have already pointed out, this is again merely a marketing technique (moar is bettr!1!!). Most of the 'media packrats' I know personally actually prefer using external storage rather than putting everything on their laptop HD. Why? For one, there's the whole 'all your eggs in one basket' thing. Additionally it makes it a lot easier to supplement their bittorrent collection of music, movies and warez by swapping usb hard drives with friends without impacting their precious ratio on a private tracker.

    1. {¯`·.¸_LÅMߤ¥_¸.·´¯}

      China doesnt have magic production lines

      "As fas as manufacturing capacity, it's probably a non-issue. If there's a market for it, China will find a way to do it. Cheap."

      If you were talking about something simple to manufacture I would agree, but the fabs are prohibitively expensive, on this point I agree with Seagate.

  20. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Just booted the spinning Hard Disk out of my Netbook

    60Gb is more than enough maybe even as low as 40Gb (an OS plus a good music collection on the move)

    Instant response versus a slow spinning 5400rpm disk

    Indestructable versus particularly fragile

    Spinning thingy maybe in your main PC or that 1Tb USB Hard Drive you have for a rainy day

    But I know which get's my vote for my lappy (and the C Drive in my PC)

    It's no contest it has to be SSD

  21. Pete 6
    WTF?

    Erm, sorry

    I already swapped out the 250gb drive in my netbook for a 120gb OCZ flash drive. Best decision ever.

  22. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Ummm I think you've all missed the point somewhat.

    It doesn't matter that most of those harddrives are virtually empty, the point being made is that the manufacturing capacity of NAND is so far behind, and so expensive to build, that they will be selling big harddrives for years to come, and it doesn't matter that the harddrives are barely used (capacity wise).

    Those hard drives will continue to grow as well, because in case you haven't noticed the same base drive platform is used across multiple drive interface boards. So 2.5" enterprise SAS drives are the same base drive as the SATA drive in laptops, just using a different interface card (a SAS one). So development of technology in 2.5" drive capacity will continue.

    If you want to argue with them about it, you're going to have to find some pretty bloody good arguments to justify them spending vast amounts of money building the manufacturing capacity, for something that frankly doesn't provide them with any major benefit.

    1. Goat Jam

      Those hard drives will continue to grow as well

      But will they/

      2TB drives have been on the market now for 18 months and bigger drives are yet to hit the market. Not even vapourware announcements are forthcoming.

      I think that the reason for this is that PC's use a BIOS that uses Master Boot Record to boot disks and MBR is unable to address anything over 2TB. From what I've read this limit is a technical limitation that cannot easily be overcome. Apple uses EFI BIOS which doesn't suffer this limitation but they do not own enough of the market to justify the expense of designing, building and distributing said drives by Seagate et al.

      If they did do so, they would probably also be inundated by returns and complaints from PC propeller heads who try and retrofit the 2TB drives to their uber PC's only to find that it doesn't work at all (or is limited to 2TB max)

      I'm not sure where the likes of Seagate go from here. I've been watching hard drive capacities that are ever growing since I had my first 5Mb Full Height 5 1/4 Winchester on CP/M and I have never seen a pause in the release of ever bigger drives, until now.

      I read on el reg a while back about this but I can't find the article now. It also mentioned that one of the manufacturers were mulling a 3GB drive that could only be used in an external USB enclosure to get around this problem.

  23. Anonymous Coward
    FAIL

    They are in self-serving denial

    Pretty simple, really. The average storage shipped with a laptop increases over time because the smallest laptop drive is always getting bigger, and the cost penalty from one platter one head to two platters four heads is pretty minimal, so its a cheap way for vendors to make the laptops seem better when naive consumers are comparing them against each other.

    Most people don't come close to filling up their laptops. Corporate laptops mainly use data on corporate servers, without a need for lots of local storage. A 32GB drive is probably plenty for most of those, with hard drives offered by corporate IT on an exception basis only. 32GB is probably fine for most consumers as well....maybe a bit larger to capture 90-95% of the market. For the rest, who are mainly DV enthusiasts or download/rip lots of video, spinning media will remain the way to go.

    I would anticipate in the next couple years some changes in the laptop market. SSD vendors will probably come up with a standardized small form factor SSD - probably about the size of a mini-PCI card. Then laptop vendors will ship the bulk of their models without space for an internal hard drive, only that small form factor SSD. I wouldn't be surprised to see built in CD/DVD players to be left out on more models than currently as well - USB attached ones are fine for occasional users and lead to a smaller/lighter laptop the rest of the time.

    Higher end laptops would be available with a 2.5" SATA bay for old fashioned hard drives for those who need the extra storage - in addition to the SSD they'd boot from.

  24. Goat Jam
    FAIL

    "The Growing StorageCapacity Demands of the LaptopPC Market"

    What growing storage capacity demands of the laptopPC market?

    Most laptops I come across have 80GB or more drives using less than 20GB. Sure, some folks want to use a laptop to edit home movies or whatever but this is not the majority of the market, not by a long shot.

    For most people a laptop with a 40-64GB drive is more than adequate. Seagate needs to come to terms with the reality that the only thing keeping SSD's out of laptops right now is the price and that their only response to that is to keep dropping the prices of their own spinny disks down to keep ahead of the game.

    They can only do that for so long of course.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      FAIL

      And again the entire point of the Seagate statement is missed.

      >>Seagate needs to come to terms with the reality that the only thing keeping SSD's out of laptops right now is the price and that their only response to that is to keep dropping the prices of their own spinny disks down to keep ahead of the game.

      That and the small fact that there isn't enough NAND manufacturing capacity to meet the demand for storage.

      It doesn't matter how much you'd all like there to be an unlimted supply of NAND to produce ever wonderful, if small SSDs to go into every laptop you ever come into contact with, there isn't an unlimited supply, and so you're all going to have to put up with Seagates (and other manufacturers) spinny disks for a few years to come yet.

  25. {¯`·.¸_LÅMߤ¥_¸.·´¯}

    price per gb will continue to fall on hdd

    @ Goat Jam

    "They can only do that for so long of course."

    Actually incorrect, the price will continue to drop 'per GB' or in the future 'per TB'. The base cost will stay much the same but you will continue to get more storage for your money, and it will always be available in large qtys as the HDD mfg capability is vast.

    SSD's however will suffer price hits due to market forces as supply is outstripped by demand. Everyone is saying SSDs will become cheaper, I think they will eventually hit a price barrier and probably rise!

  26. Robert Carnegie Silver badge

    "Many years to come" = up to, not necessarily including, next Christmas.

    Personally I like to carry videos on my notebook, netbook, or tablet (and tablets are computers, so they count). But if my employer issues me a laptop, they won't take my personal use into account.

    SSDs are now big enough to run PCs respectably, and that's what counts. They use less power and they aren't excessively expensive.

    Much of users' data will still be stored on hard disks, but, as has been said, the hard disks will be in servers in the cloud.

    As for large disks...... I recently was looking at this requirement, because my latest tablet-notebook (HP TouchSmart TM2-1010EA) has four MBR primary partitions supplied so I can't easily re-partition it. (I am planning, however, to install the HP diagnostic tools to an SD card and delete their disk partition - they're only about 10 MB and you can download 'em. Of course I will totally back up everything first.) GUID Partition Table instead of MBR allows disks larger than 2 TB, and EFI or UEFI allows booting from a GPT disk. Since the HP tool executables are EFI according to file name extension, I think everything that's needed is there, but since it involves entirely wiping the hard disk (maybe using Ubuntu or GParted Live), I am not going that way.

    BIOS support WILL be replaced by UEFI, and if it isn't here in time for ridiculously large hard disks then surely they will simply make a disk that has two or more SATA ports and that untruthfully tells the computer that it is two physical hard disks instead of one big one. A "jumper" may be involved, as twentieth-century as that is.

  27. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Down

    talk is cheap, and is unused capacity

    I've been known to buy a laptop with huge capacity, but not because I intended to use it. It was more a case of, "If I can step up from 320GB to 500GB for just $75 and spare myself the headache of switching drives later on, might as well; better safe than sorry."

    2008 marks the year I bought my last internal hard drive. As the saying goes, once you've had flash...

  28. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    so a couple of years for production to ramp up....

    ...providing no other disruptive technology arrives in the meantime.

    Multiple read heads per platter (or platters working in sync like a raid array within one drive)... advances in materials science doubling the density, the addition of a de/compression chip... or something entirely different like switchable state ram.

    Amazed that nobody has suggestion of HDs remain within more refined future hybrid drives, and no talk of context; factors such as price of bandwidth, success of the cloud; could render local portable storage solutions a moot discussion - or not, if 3d HD films (or some other format demanding loads of space) become de rigeur and laptops widely able to play them.

    Had anyone got a "number of units" comparison which might provide a truer indication?

  29. E 2
    Alert

    Seriously

    How many gigs does the average MP3 collection occupy? I've got about 48GB. I'm not going to carry all my ripped movies around on my laptop - can't see the point. Music I can see the point of though.

    The biggest reason I can see for big HDDs in notebooks is that Win7+Office seems to need somewhat north of a bunch of gigs to install. But that's not much of an arg for a TB in a notebook.

    I've never run out of space with a 160GB disk in my notebook, and that's a dual boot Win+Linux scheme.

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