Future Laptop Harddrive advances?

Posted:
in Future Apple Hardware edited January 2014
I'm considering buying a new harddrive for my macbookpro. But before I do: What are the harddrive advances coming down the pipeline?



I understand there's SSD, any dates announced on larger capacity? I'm looking for reasons to hold off buying a 500GB 7200rpm

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 3
    benroethigbenroethig Posts: 2,782member
    You'll have 512mb and 1TB SSDs within the next year, but they'll cost as much as the computer, if not more. I'd say ~5 years until the price goes down to affordable levels and they truly begin to replace hard drives.



    As for the tried and true, you should be seeing 640 and 750GB drives later this year and 1TB in 2010.
  • Reply 2 of 3
    hmurchisonhmurchison Posts: 12,419member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by jApple View Post


    I'm considering buying a new harddrive for my macbookpro. But before I do: What are the harddrive advances coming down the pipeline?



    I understand there's SSD, any dates announced on larger capacity? I'm looking for reasons to hold off buying a 500GB 7200rpm



    Intel should be announcing a 320GB SSD before year's end. Though it'll be around $800.



    We're still waiting for the drive vendors to start offering 750GB 2.5" drives. We may have to wait until next year for those drives.



    I figure in 2-3 years you'll have 500GB SSD drives for a few hundred bucks if not less. Next year we'll see San Disk's 3-bit per cell SSD technology hit and that'll give an instant boost to SSD drive sizes. Today's 80GB MLC drive suddenly becomes 120GB.



    I'm mulling over buying a Unibody next year ..removing the optical drive and placing a 500GB HDD for data and running my Boot/application drive on a SSD (maybe even a SLC for improved durability and write performance)
  • Reply 3 of 3
    MarvinMarvin Posts: 15,309moderator
    You can get a 512GB SSD but at $1575, it's a bit pricey:



    http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...pk=512gb%20ssd



    250GB Vertex SSD from OCZ is $695:



    http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820227396



    By contrast a 250GB 7200 rpm HDD is $75:



    http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822136279



    The advantages worth paying for with SSD are reliability and performance but as the reviews of the SSD drives have shown, a number of people report SSD failures. Also, performance varies a lot between SSDs and after prolonged use they can end up slower than standard drives. Right now, that kind of experience isn't worth 10x the price.



    When they work, they can be as much as 3 times faster than normal drives, which is worth getting but you can drop two 250GB 2.5" 7200 rpm HDDs in and use RAID-0 to get 500GB 120MB/s for $150.



    Even in the event of a drive failure, you don't really have to worry about sending back to the manufacturer. Dropping $75 for a replacement isn't a huge deal.



    SSD is certainly the way forward though and Intel are rumored to be doing their capacity doubling this month:



    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/06..._ssd_capacity/



    This week according to some rumors. Trouble is, Intel's prices are higher than other SSDs so I'd expect their 320GB version to come in at $700 minimum.



    The above idea about using a low capacity SSD as a boot drive and a HDD for storage in the optical bay is probably the best thing to do right now until the prices come way down. I'd personally pay up to 4 times the cost of a standard hard drive for an Intel SSD so Intel just have to drop the price by half again and that's enough for me. Hopefully we will see this in 2010.
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