Old School

I may be showing my age but I was taught to conserve space, clean up your old data and take out the trash. My problem with 2TB, 3TB, 10TB.......??? is very simple. It is on a mechanical device in a magnetic format that has a tendency to "age" with the magnetic domains interfering with each other over a long term and to "crash" as in the head physically scraping the data off the disk surface. Therefore, unless refreshed annually (?) it in not a good long term storage solution and for short term storage, how much data do I trust to a single mechanical device? This would then imply that I need several units to make sure that all of my data is safe from a crash. The problem with these large sizes and bulk storage is the time it takes for backups and updates and now I have to make several copies.

The drive industry is talking 10X and 100X the current capacities. No thanks. That’s OK for large projects but normal applications I would rather keep my data in smaller segments for easier backup. The only real value to me, other than special applications, is that making drives bigger means the cost of the smaller ones drops. Please go buy the 3TB units. With 5 platters and 10 heads, this means that there is 600GB on the single platter dual head version and although the cost won’t be one fifth, it will be substantially lower and much less susceptible to crashing.

Size is for power geeks. I want to hear how this impacts the low end cost.