Hard disk drives are one of the slowest computer components in the industry today. Due to their mechanics, they have not been able to keep up with other constantly updated technologies such as GPUs, CPUs, and chipsets. All storage manufacturers are mainly doing is increasing rotational speeds for platters, which lead to better I/O performance, switching standards (PATA to SATA for desktop hard disk drives), and integrating on-board cache (2MB à 8MB à 16MB) depending upon the generation of drives. The differences we just listed are all for performance gains, however, physically storage manufacturers are developing hard drives that are both smaller in size and larger in capacity.

Until this year, 400GB of space on a single hard disk drive was unheard of, but it quickly changed with Hitachi’s announcement. The hard disk drive aspects we listed above are only few of the major improvements that manufacturers have done to keep the drives with latest industry standards and growth. Of course, they have made changes to platter density and whatnot for larger sized hard drives, but it is nothing significant to consider the hard disk drive storage industry evolutionary.



Link: CTZ