Something that's interested me is how hard drive capacities have continuously gone up, but read and write speeds have not really changed. To the point where it would take multiple days to read these new high capacity drives.
I wonder what the use case for them is, they aren't ideal for RAID as they would take far too long to rebuild the array in a drive failure, but they also aren't great for long term cold storage. Perhaps they are ideal for periodic backups where you want to take a daily 1TB backup of a server or CCTV where you don't really care about backing up the data as it's all deleted on schedule anyway.
Speeds do go up with density. Take an empty 4 TB drive and an empty 16 TB drive, and then write and read 2 TB of data to both of them. Since the platters on the 16 TB one are that much denser, you go over a lot more blocks in a single spin than the 4 TB one.
That's a very logical theory, but it doesn't really seem to hold up in real-world data transfer speeds.
For instance: 7200 RPM SATA drives have been stuck in the peak-performance realm of between about 250 and 300 megabytes per second for a decade, even though maximum capacity has more than tripled over that time.
Gigachad · · focus · HN ↗
I wonder what the use case for them is, they aren't ideal for RAID as they would take far too long to rebuild the array in a drive failure, but they also aren't great for long term cold storage. Perhaps they are ideal for periodic backups where you want to take a daily 1TB backup of a server or CCTV where you don't really care about backing up the data as it's all deleted on schedule anyway.
Hamuko · · focus · HN ↗
ssl-3 · · focus · HN ↗
For instance: 7200 RPM SATA drives have been stuck in the peak-performance realm of between about 250 and 300 megabytes per second for a decade, even though maximum capacity has more than tripled over that time.