Larger single-platter HDDs

Does anyone know when single platter capacity of HDDs is going to increase? The 500GB models have been out for a while, but I haven't heard anything regarding the road map for future increases. Anyone has any information?

 

No, but I'd like to know too. If I were to venture a guess, the next bump will be 640 or 750GB.

 

Single platter laptop hard drives are really at 500GB?

 

1tb 9.5mm drives are only 2 platters...

 

When the laws of physics change? Ok, ok, don't yell at me. But honestly, theres only so much you can do given size/speed constraints.

Most likely rather than tweaking what we have, we will likely move away from spinning discs altogether.

Thats the intent with SSDs. They're just too expensive for the moment to become the mainstream.

 

If 4k displays are really incoming, HDD's are going to be the standard for consumer large-scale storage for a long time. Video files at 4k resolutions will be enormous. It would take 2-3 years to get TB SSDs cheap enough to consider as storage drives for today's storage needs, and with 4k video files replacing 1080p at four times the size in people's storage drives, storage needs will go up beyond that TB level that many people are already at or past now.

Eventually SSD storage will be the standard for cheap, reliable storage, and one day they'll be superseded by something that's smaller, faster, and uses less power again. The ascendance of SSDs as a replacement for HDDs in storage situations is far off, though, so in the meantime HDD technology will continue to lumber forward, though maybe not as fast as it did when it was the only option for R&D dollars.

 

Well aren't I the one with egg on my face. I should have known better than to try and pull a fast one on you guys. That thought was going through my head as I was typing but I figured nobody would care or be aware of such things at this site especially since many here have already buried optical discs.

As a matter of fact, almost every manufacture has a 4k camera on the market or near market release so the media had better be ready to accept it.

I'm not sure what the calculation on a 4k movie would be but Pioneer came out with a 100GB writer some time ago. However, due to lack of interest (and disc rarity) it fell out of popularity shortly after release.

 

Don't worry, before I read your post I was thinking the same thing, but then I started to consider the other side of things. I do expect HDD's to be phased out eventually, and you're right that there's gotta be a limit of how much they can push forward without radically altering the technology. The main difference between what you posted and what I posted is the timeframe of the handoff from spinning disks to SSD, not the eventuality of it.