 |
Futuretech: Bigger, better, and faster, hard drives
January 01, 2006. pg 42.
By Logan Booker, Atomic MPC
and Ed Dawson, PC Authority
The natural term of your drive
When we buy a piece of technology these days, few of us expect it to survive beyond the life of its warranty. Hard drive warranties are typically around three to five years. Does that mean that it will fail drastically once that time is up? What is the realistic lifespan of a consumer PC hard drive? These questions seemed to create a small sense of panic among our respondents.
Hitachi’s Mr Dharan maintained a cool head:
'A warranty period is set based on a variety of parameters, such as the typical usage pattern of a drive. The life of a hard drive typically exceeds the actual usage of the hard drive as users upgrade systems, require more space, etc.' This measured, failure-related-to-usage argument was echoed by Samsung’s Mr Kang:
'The chances of failure is a statistical issue,' he says. 'A common reference used in the industry is mean time between failure (MTBF). The MTBF of HDD for PCs is about 600,000 hours. You can have a hard disk that shows failure in less than a year or vice versa one that operates flawlessly for a decade.'
In contrast, Seagate’s Dr Re was bullish:
'An HDD’s lifespan is typically much longer. For example, a current desktop Seagate drive is specified as having an Annualized Failure Rate of .34 percent. What this means is that within five years, only 1.74 percent of those drives would be estimated to have failed.
'When drives are in a protected environment, such as a home or office, and they are used in an archival or backup situation (where the drive is not continuously used), the data on the drive is capable of lasting at least 20 to 30 years,' he said. Of course, you would be operating that drive for something like 25 years completely out of warranty, which would make most people nervous (not to mention irritable for an upgrade).
Nothing is forever
While storing all of a computer’s information on a single hard drive is a regular occurrence, the seemingly random failure of hard drives can be a terrifying thought. While hard drives generally have a respectably long life, is it long enough? As magnetic tape is falling out of favour, some may have cause to ask: what lasts longer than a hard drive? Is there a more permanent form of storage?
Seagate’s Dr Re says that the hard drive has transformed to meet that need.
'There are developments in this area. With various government regulations for data retention and with the trust that we all put into storage to keep our personal memories with pictures and videos of family and friends, we at Seagate are actively pursuing archival storage. We are already seeing market forces to have disk drives replace tape, and we have active research to have drives reliably store data for many decades.
'Seagate researchers have estimated that disk drives can hold material in archived form for 20-30 years.' This may perhaps be a singularly hard-drive-centric perspective, though.
Samsung’s Mr Kang describes efforts to reach beyond the paradigm of the hard drive:
'In the past, magnetic tape (and) optical-magnetic disk drives were considered as permanent archival storage, but today academic research on permanent recording media is in progress. Such technologies are being researched at a separate R&D arm at Samsung Group, the Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology, a technology incubating centre of Samsung. Probe storage is one of the fields in research at this centre.'
Western Digital’s Dr Cain warns against blindly relying on anything:
'No form of storage is permanent — all materials eventually degrade. Hard drives have relatively high archival capabilities, typically higher than flash and optical technologies, for example, but not forever; nothing is.'
Solid state or pie in the sky?
There has been much recent discussion on the concept of solid-state drives, with far less or no moving parts, as compared against a hard drive’s constantly spinning stack of platters, made from aluminium or glass. Following the beliefs of engineers who follow the ideals of mechatronics, designing fewer moving parts into a device ought to create something more reliable and less prone to mechanical failure. Through such rose-coloured glasses, a solid-state drive seems utopian. But all of our hard drive experts were quick to rain on the parade.
Dr Cain points to cost per gigabyte as a primary factor:
'WD is not working on solid-state storage technology and currently believes that at least within the next five to eight years, probably much longer — if ever — solid state will not have a place as primary storage in a PC. The efficiency of hard drive technology in cost per gigabyte far exceeds that of solid state, especially in desktop form factor hard drives.'
Dr Re concurs, noting flash memory’s capacity limitations:
'It’s more likely that non-volatile storage will creep up the low end of the storage spectrum as we have seen over the last couple of years in handheld and portable devices that don’t need a lot of capacity.'
Mr Kang is also in agreement:
'The recent introduction of solid state memory (Flash memory) as a storage media to many digital, mobile applications reflects a trend for smaller, lighter and less power consuming features … such as provided by flash memory.'
He expects storage media to become a large segmented market, with a number of niche areas using different storage technology.
Flying heads
Sometimes, when you ask a group of scientists a question, there’ll be debate over certain issues. This was what we experienced when we asked all of our hard drive experts to describe the dangers of moving or twisting a laptop with the hard drive in action. Previous answers we’ve had on this topic have ranged from 'no problem' to 'do not do this, ever'.
Hitachi’s Mr Dharan seems to think that it is a non-issue:
'Assuming normal shock and operating conditions, the drive would not be impacted by the gyroscopic effects from just moving or twisting a laptop. Any effects could reasonably be managed by the motor speed control of the drive and can recover rather quickly.'
Seagate’s Dr Re suggests that a hard drive could be designed to withstand almost anything:
'Different hard drives are created with different design applications in mind. For example, notebook drives are designed for greater shock/vibration characteristics. Other hard drives Seagate produces are designed to withstand temperature extremes for automotive environments. Seagate drives have been deployed in a number of places from taking flight in the Space Shuttle, to onboard systems in Navy fighter jets, to journeys on Mt Everest.'
Dr Cain of Western Digital was guardedly optimistic:
'The orientation of the notebook computer —and subsequently, the hard drive — does not matter. Hard drives will operate in any vertical or horizontal orientations.
However, sudden movement or shock to a notebook computer could damage the hard drive.'
In contrast, Samsung’s Mr Kang wasn’t going to recommend it under any circumstances: 'Due to the movement of the head and media, generally a hard drive is not recommended to be moved or placed in an environment of physical distortion.'
We may just have to leave this question in the perennial 'How long is a piece of string?' category.
  |
 |
