Seagate halting production of 7200rpm notebook hard drives.

[techs]

http://hothardware.com/News/Seagate-Will-Stop-Production-of-7200RPM-Hard-Drives-To-Focus-on-SSDs/

Seagate Will Stop Production of 7200RPM Hard Drives To Focus on SSDs

We've long since wondered when SSDs would hit a price (and size) threshold that most mainstream consumers would opt for one over a conventional HDD. We're still a few years out from that, we imagine, but you can see the writing on the wall. Seagate, one of the world's largest storage companies, already has a mind to kill off the 2.5" (laptop-sized) 7200RPM hard drive from its portfolio. Why? Flash storage is taking off in a major way for portables, while desktops still seem to favor slow-but-huge in many cases. Moreover, the introduction of the hybrid HDD (part flash, part HDD) has made getting a taste of flash a little cheaper.

David Burks, director of marketing and product management at Seagate Technology, was quoted as saying the following: "We are going stop building our notebook 7200rpm hard disk drives at the end of 2013."



I noticed how laptop manufacturers were making it far more expensive to order one with a 7200 rpm drive. You had to go to nearly a thousand dollars before it even became an option.

 

[Russwinters]

no point run 7200rpm when you can run a hybrid drive with flash on it + 5400rpm for space + energy efficiency.

 

[jaqie]

no point running 7.2k rpm anymore with arial density being so insanely high anymore the benefits are almost zero and for laptops the drawbacks are quite big... higher RPM makes it that much more difficult to ensure safety when the laptop is bumped or dropped with it spinning, and the faster speed actually uses more electricity as well.

 

[sub.mesa]

Contrary to popular belief, the lower the rpm, the better the drive usually.

Lower rpm makes it easier to resolve calibration issues on drives with increasingly higher data density. Higher data density increases sequential I/O performance considerably while not adding anything to power consumption. The power consumption of a harddrive basically revolved around one thing: the motor. It has to continually spend power to maintain the rpm, which otherwise would fall due to friction with the gasses inside the harddrive.

The lower the rpm, the less probabily of mechanical issues. If harddrives would spin at only one rpm, that would solve a lot of reliability issues. Unfortunately, this is hardly feasible. But 4200rpm - 5400rpm would be the sweet spot probably. As you may know, air friction increased exponentially. So there certainly are sweet spots where the power loss and lower reliability is offset by good gains in performance. But beyond that, beyond 5400-5900rpm, you will only marginally add to sequential performance while potentially crippling reliability or other mechanical issues. Power consumption and heat generations increase disproportional to the small gains in sequential I/O performance. I do not think it is worth it.

With SSDs here today providing performance storage, all that is left for HDDs to do is mass storage of large files. So let's optimize them to do just this task: let us build 4200rpm harddrives with much much higher data density that are twice as fast as todays drives while consuming only a third of todays harddrives. That is possible, but probably will be frustrated by marketing departments. And in situations where it revolves around marketing versus technical department, the former always wins.