Hard Drive Prices

[DougC]

With all these high capacity hard drives showing up at cheaper and cheaper prices, does this mean a new storage medium is coming and will make our present hardware obsolete?

[kenw]

as long as you can read and write to/from it, it isn't obsolete. I can still read/write 5 1/4 floppies.

seriously, solid state drives (SSD) are dropping in price and placing price pressure on rotating media disk drives. But your current rotating old-school hard drive is just fine as long as it works for you. Obsolete is a much-misused term in technology.

[Peacock]

Your present hardware was obselete, yesterday / last week! LOL!

[srwatters]

Like MFM and IDE, current SATA drive will see less use as newer technologies come forward. Although I won't bet on SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) yet, I'm guessing that something will come along that makes SATA go away. Most likely not before the MTBF comes on new drives bought today though.

YMMV. IMHO. Yadda, yadda, yadda...

[zeroendless]

Nothing new on the horizontal for consumer drives, SATA interface will stay put for quite some time.

On relevant topic, the USB 3.0, however, will be the next big thing for all and today's USB 2.0 equipped electronic devices. It makes you wonder the whole firewire standard would slowly phase out, there weren't much noise coming from the upcoming S3200 standard.

For storage, that means your next-gen USB reader, USB external drive or USB SSD has the potential to approach or suppress eSATA interface bandwidth. If anything is going away, that would be eSATA.

[Sonny]

Originally Posted by zeroendless

On relevant topic, the USB 3.0, however, will be the next big thing for all and today's USB 2.0 equipped electronic devices. It makes you wonder the whole firewire standard would slowly phase out, there weren't much noise coming from the upcoming S3200 standard.

HELL YEAH! I can't wait for USB 3.0 to get here!! I read about this last summer and was sooooo excited!!! Unfortunately it looks like we'll have to wait til 2010.

USB 3.0 promises a theoretical maximum rate of 5Gbps, meaning it's 10 times faster than USB 2.0. USB 3.0 is also full duplex, meaning it can upload and download simultaneously (it's bi-directional); USB 2.0 is only half duplex.

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