Ars Technica reported that Samsung has not found any buyers for its impressive 250 GB 1.8″ hard drive. Evidently Toshiba has the same problem.
Is there a market for large capacity 1.8″ drives? Apple has dropped back to 120 GB drives in the iPod Classic, its largest capacity player, from 160 is some earlier models.
My personal music collection is over 11,000 tracks, most ripped at 320kbps – as good as MP3 gets – and that is less than 90 GB total. Until we can persuade people to carry around a couple of hundred movies – ripped DVDs average around around 800 MB on an iPhone – 120 GB seems like a reasonable maximum.
What’s next?
One answer to that question may be coming from Samsung itself. Their new mini-card SSDs feature a SATA interface.
The Toshiba 1.8″ HDD is 8mm x 54mm x 78.5mm, versus 3.75mm x 30mm x 51mm for the mini-card SSD. That’s almost 1/6th the volume for 1/4 the capacity with current chip density.
The Toshiba uses 1.2W during read/write operations, while Samsung claims 0.3W for the SSD, even less than the 0.4W the disk uses in low power idle mode. The disk is 60g vs 8.5g for the SSD.
Performance probably favors the disk, but with the duty-cycle of such small devices it isn’t crucial. Anyway the buyers have already spoken.
The StorageMojo take
Cost plays a role: the Toshiba 250 GB HDD retails for $175. The 64 GB Samsung SSD won’t be any cheaper, at least initially, but it will be smaller and the price will be coming down faster.
As I forecast 2 years ago:
With flash prices dropping 70% a year and disks 45%, the trend is inexorable: flash will just get more attractive every year. Add in the power, weight and durability advantages, and the prognosis for the 1.8″ drive is grim.
At 70¢ per GB (retail) the 1.8″ drive loses the clear cost advantage over flash. Since 64 GB is plenty for netbooks and media players, capacity isn’t enough to bring users.
Samsung’s USB-only offering suggests that they see an opening for a high-capacity thumb drive. But 250 GB bumps up against the bandwidth limits that USB 2 provides.
Will USB 3.0 – 400MB/s usable, due next year – save the high-capacity 1.8″ drive? Stay tuned.
Courteous comments welcome, of course.
Hi there lets see i hope that flash memory or solid state wins out i bought this year 2 hp net books 1 with a 16 gb ssd and anouther with a 32 gb ssd a 64 gb ipod touch a hd camcorder and 8 mp camrea with 256 mb of flash memory with a 16 gb micro sd cards and a swiss army knife with also 16 gb usb flash drive a psp go with 16 gb flash drive and 64 mb of ram and for 20010 i will buy a wii 2 with 4 gb flash drive 2010 xbox 360 with a 32 gb ssd and a sega rind edge also with a 32 gb ssd flash drives as well as you can tell i am 100% flash memory or solid state flash drives and have zero hard drives and i will also get a intel 80 gb ssd for my ps3 beucase in my 33 years of hard drives i had 11 hdd hard drive failuers and the xbox 20 gb hdd is soo slow only hard drives i would buy would be the 10,000 rpm voloci-raptors from western digital or the 15,000 rpm cheeta hard drives from seagate or laser hard drives at 160 tb/s too 610 tb/s thats terabytes per second at 37.5 tb terabyte storage capacity here is the list of stuff that had hard drive failuers 2 hdd camcorders 1 hdd tivo 1 60 gb classic ipod with hard drive replaced with the 64 gb ipod touch useing 64 gb flash drive and about 5 or 6 hard drive computers and my archos tablet with a 320 gb hard drive it also failed too bad luck with spinning platers
hi there got a 32 gb ipad going get the 32 gb iphone 4 and nintendo 3ds has 2 gb of flash memory too
@james braselton
Thirty-three years? Baloney. Hard disk drives were not commonly used with microcomputers in 1976. Seagate Technology introduced the ST-506, the first 5.25 inches (133 mm) drive, in 1980.
If you’re 33 years old, you crashed your first hard drive maybe twenty years ago. Who suffers a platter failure every other year? Clearly user error.