Why are hard drives not literally big?

[ShawnD1]

Why are hard drives not bigger? If hard drives were physically bigger, wouldn't they be able to fit just enormous amounts of data on them? If the radius were twice as big, the amount of data it could hold would be 4x as much.

I know it's a very stupid and old way of thinking but in terms of hard drives, it works.

[lost-and-found]

wouldn't that greatly increase seek times though? since the storage surface is much bigger the drive has to look for the needle in a bigger pile of hay

[ShawnD1]

But it's already like that. 120gb hard drives have crappy seek times.

[SeanC]

They would be physically bigger, heavier, etc... Manufacturers are moving towards small and miniaturized equipment.

In the old days hard drives were usually about 1 metre (4 to 5 feet) square or so and could weigh several hundred pounds.

Sean

[bdj]

I used to work for Wang Labs. The had 300Mb drives that had 19 R/W heads a 1 servo head for tracking. The platters were approx. 18 " in diameter, and the entire drive weighed in at over 600 pounds. That was 10 years ago. Today 120gb drives are half height 3.5" form, weighing less then two pounds.

Some difference.

bdj.

[dauss]

Its called standards. Just like back in the day guns were all custom made and parts weren't interchangeable, so if it broke a new gun would have had to be made. Then Eli Whitney suggested the introduction of standardized manufacture with interchangeable parts into American industry. Hard drives right now are standard. They fit in computer cases that conform to this standard. Its sort of like the DVD-R and DVD+R recordable DVD format war. Also as technology progresses, things are made smaller and more things can be put into products.

[Scott Tiger]

Yep - seek times would get worse with the larger diameter disks. I think adding more 3.5 inch disks would be the more effective solution if you wanted more capacity without having to re-invent the wheel. I still say current HD capacities are much higher than they need to be anyway though. I'd much rather see a technology adopted that gives us more reliablity than capacity. Just my IMO.

[ShawnD1]

120gb is not enough by far. I have over 30 movies on my computer and more are on the way. That 120 is gonna run out real fast. I also play my video games through virtual CD drives because they play much faster. Anybody who has ever played Diablo2 will tell you that it lags real bad trying to read from the CD drive when you kill Diablo; only the play disc is on virtual CD though .

[ArcticFox]

I agree with the VirtualCD applications.

I like to play Red Alert 2 a lot, and the game just can't stop spinning the CD drive up. I'll leave it at the paused screen when I'm in the middle of a skirmish and when I have to go to an appointment or whatnot, and I'll come back to be greeted with a nice warm CD drive because the game never spun the CD down. When it actually does, it will be in the middle of a game and then for some reason, it needs more data so theirs a lag period for my Lite-On 40x12x48 to spin up the disk.

Annoying? Definitely, and it's why I'll probably invest in a couple/few WD Special Edition 120gb drives in RAID 0 for super speed, super noise, and super capacity.

[Brainchild]

Well all ya have to do is hook up a raid card Should be plenty of space availible once you add 7-8 120gb drives
Of course a nice CD-RW will help ya out in the movie dept too.They play fine from a CD-ROM