One

Seagate announced yesterday the launch of their new hard disk, the Momentus Thin drive. It is still 2.5″ wide, but only 7 mm thick. The first models come with 160 GB or 250 GB and a 3 Gbit/s SATA connection. Still at 5400 rpm to reduce the power consumption, it is very comparable to regular laptop drives. 7 mm is 2.5 mm less than the previous models in the market.

This progress indicates that flash disks have not won yet and that disks are still in the running for miniaturisation, while increasing their  capacity. Laptops may become thinner as well. Servers may get thinner, whereas datacenter space for storage may be reduced as well. Nice to see that netbooks have an impact on the datacenter

Still to prove (at least for me) is the reliability. The density increase means that every bit takes less space on the disk and migt be more prone to loss (?). Additionally, what I don’t know, is how long a disk can last. Most of the laptops I had, had disks lasting at least 3 years. My home computer has 4 disks since at least 5 years, but two already needed replacement.

The progress is tremendous when you look at it over nearly 30 years of personal computers. I remember the PC/AT coming out with a disk of 5 or 10 MBytes. I remember that the people requiring the 10 MB version were the *big* consumers. Today we need at least 10.000 times more (= 100 Gbytes) if not 100.000 times more (1 TByte), with more requirements in terms of speed and reliability. And it needs to be portable as well.

I am wondering who will win in the long run. Disk or flash on the netbooks ? Some vendors already have 128 GB flash drives….