Western Digital working on 20,000rpm Raptor

[TooNice]

32GB memory stick are not exactly great performers. A 64GB Mtron will still set you back by over £1000, so assuming price halved every year, and whilst capacity doubles for the same price, it will be at least another two years before you get 256GB for under £250. I can see SSD take the position of the Raptor eventually, in a few years, but it will be a long time before it will become 'mainstream' in both price and availability. It comes down to how quickly WD can release the 20k RPM Raptors, and whether they can recoup their R&D costs. What I wonder is whether the release of a 20k RPM Raptor lead to WD 'upgrading' their Caviar series to 10k RPM. 7200RPM drives have come a very long way (as has 5400 drives, going by the GP), but all else being equal, there is some performance advantage from more RPM.

[FifthFreedom]

The only improvements to hard drives which most people care is capacity.

We've already got TB drives for £100 what else can people possibly have to store?

The only improvements left for storage are speed and price and soon enough SSD's will offer both.

The latest 32Gig SSD is a SanDisk for $350.

Thats not very expensive if you think about it.

HDD's are going out, give it 10 years...

[aidanjt]

The only improvements to hard drives which most people care is capacity.

We've already got TB drives for £100 what else can people possibly have to store?

Microsoft made the same assumptions when they implemented FAT16, then FAT32 and both filesystems were useless within 10 years. Storage consumption grows exponentially along with storage availability. Just think how big a few minutes of 1080p video is, then think per movie, then think movie libraries, suddenly you're talking several hundreds of terabytes.

The only improvements left for storage are speed and price and soon enough SSD's will offer both.

Not so, more storage space will always be an important factor.

The latest 32Gig SSD is a SanDisk for $350.

Thats not very expensive if you think about it.

170/32 = £5.31/GB
100/1000 = £0.10/GB

The latter is also significantly faster and more reliable. Which is the better buy? I certainly wouldn't pay over 50 times more money for an inferior product.

HDD's are going out, give it 10 years...

Eventually yes, maybe not 10 years, but it will eventually, just not today, or anywhere close to today.