Hard disk drives are hitting a wall for density in 2019, with thinner gases and platters needed to raise capacity. and few breakthroughs are forecasted that will raise 3.5” disk capacity to 40TB and beyond.
Then I thought, why not take the size of the first hard drives and put today’s densities on them, we could have a washing machine sized hard drive in the exabytes. Then I realized the R&D, Factory Tooling & RPMs for such drives would make it an hard sell to datacenters with slow read / write speeds.
So I realized, why has nobody proposed to double / triple / quadruple the height of a 3.5” HDD to fit more platters inside? By making the drive housing multiples thicker of a standard drive, you can at least double the HD data capacity with todays mature platter technology.
This way, the HD only needs one write arm, one motor, one spindle, one interface board, one set of SATA ports and one housing to multiply the capacity of a hard drive. It would need minimal R&D, tooling, for the read/write head, spindle and housing manufacture. The drive might cost twice as much to make but have 5 times the capacity as you are using the high precision parts of the hard drive for 5 times the platters.
They could make a drive five standard drives thick, about as tall as it is long, and have 6x the platters compared to 5 seperate HDs. This Sextuple HD could store a 100 TB and sell for $300 retail in 2019, and the company that made it could make double digit profit margins.
Datacenters would gobble this up as the cost per terabyte is a fraction of the price compared to buying multiple standard HDs. Even if half as reliable as standard HDs they would gobble it up due to the sheer reduction in storage costs.
Prosumers benefit too, imagine being Linus Tech Tips creating a TB a day in raw 12k video footage. Imagine buying a 100 TB hard drive for $300 in 2019!
My digital life is less than 10TB, but I would love buying Triple HDs because I could store every MB I have on one drive, and carry it like a lunch box with over 20TB to spare!
I nearly kept this to myself to patent it, but I realized this would make me & lots of people richer if it got on the market soon. So I’m posting it so someone can convince WD, Seagate or HGST to give it a chance on the market.-- Dignium, Jun 28 2019 Image of a 14 platter HDD https://www.hdd-too...cal-components.html [xaviergisz, Jun 28 2019] // slow read / write speeds.//
Just RAID your large drive for better speed.-- Voice, Jun 28 2019 I think the likelihood of SSD prices dropping to be the same as HD prices going to dissuade anyone from investing in new HD technology-- hippo, Jun 28 2019 HDDs are so cheap these days I don't know why computers don't come with an automatic backup HDD (also known as RAID 1) as the default. This should mitigate any concerns about HDD crashing/bricking, since the chances of both HDD crashing at the same time are tiny (unless of course the HDD crash is caused by dropping the computer).-- xaviergisz, Jun 28 2019 Seemingly many milennia ago, but actually only in the mid-1980's, the IBM PC-XT came equipped with a 10Mb 5.25" "full height" MFM hard disk drive.
Physically, this was the same form factor as two typical DVD drives placed on on another. These drives were extraordinarily fragile, consumed huge amounts of energy, were only slightly faster than Edison waxed cylinders in terms of access time, and cost as much as a small car. They were also highly desireable, meaning that they were usually allocated to managers where their potential as computing devices was wasted.
A quick test indicated that one of these drives would occupy the same volume as about 8 2.5" HDDs placed "on edge" with space for a fan and some auxiliary electronics, so upgrading an XT with 640Kb of RAM and a 4.77MHz processor with an additional 16Tb of drive space would be an interesting project; getting MSDOS 3.3 to address that much capacity would be a challenge.-- 8th of 7, Jun 28 2019 I have an uncomfortable feeling about blindly putting all my data on "the cloud". Call me old fashioned if you will ...-- normzone, Jun 28 2019 [norm], you're old-fashioned.-- 8th of 7, Jun 29 2019 No, but it allows better conformity to the dimensions of the larger drive.-- 8th of 7, Jun 29 2019 Just find yourself a reasonably good Mentat?-- RayfordSteele, Jun 29 2019 Just make sure he's RLL encoded. (Red-Lipped Logician?)-- lurch, Jun 30 2019 random, halfbakery