One of the most uninteresting topics of discussion, when it comes to PC components, are hard drives. This particular field in the computing industry simply doesn’t move at the same pace as other system components. When Intel and AMD launched their new platforms, the entire computing industry changed to better architectures, at least theoretically, with improved efficiency and better performance (let’s take Intel’s high-priced, immature platform out of the question for a moment and focus on developments).

With newer platforms came new standards, but with hard drives, nothing much has changed. Sure, we saw Western Digital’s 10K RPM Raptors and Maxtor’s 16MB cache drives with NCQ, but is the time frame justifiable? Even after these developments, users are left wanting more out of this industry as a whole. That’s not to say that we expect hard drive manufacturers to develop hard drives like AMD, Intel, NVIDIA and ATI does with their CPUs and GPUs, but we would certainly like to see a set pattern where users can expect something significant in this industry. After talking to some manufacturers at the Consumer Electronics Show, we were surprised at what they had to say about the industry as a whole and their plans for 2005.



Link: CTZ