Why have hard drive capacities slowed so much?

[lamedude]

They have 3D porn now but I assume most people that know how to install a 3TB HDD get their fix from the tube sites these days.

 

[Jeff7181]

Google, amazon, yahoo, and other companies that need massive servers.

I doubt it. Tons of capacity with few spindles is useless.

 

[Nothinman]

So I can get support for UEFI boots from Redhat or some other linux vendor for a 10year old distribution? That'd be quite surprising (but who knows, I haven't looked it up) - or don't we have to apply the same standards to all?

The same standard doesn't apply because Linux distros are updated more frequently at zero cost to the end user. If someone said they were having issues with FF2.x wouldn't the first thing you told them to do would be to upgrade because it's free and mostly painless?

Win 7 install base is larger, it just passed XP

http://www.dailytech.com/Windows+7+P...ticle23016.htm

The article is from only 5 days ago and the difference is still listed at only ~2% so my original point still holds true.

 

[Voo]

The same standard doesn't apply because Linux distros are updated more frequently at zero cost to the end user. If someone said they were having issues with FF2.x wouldn't the first thing you told them to do would be to upgrade because it's free and mostly painless?

Which doesn't change the fact that no linux vendor does support 10 year old distributions either. The only difference is that MS demands payment for their new releases with which you personally have a problem, but that's about it.

Also backporting costs money and it's a rather bad business plan to backport new feature to your 10year old OS that's already superseded by not one but two versions. You can invest that time better in implementing new stuff in the current OS. Or to make another comparison to the linux world: Canonical doesn't backport and support most of the new features to their LTSes either.

 

[taltamir]

Which doesn't change the fact that no linux vendor does support 10 year old distributions either. The only difference is that MS demands payment for their new releases with which you personally have a problem, but that's about it.

Free upgrades is a fair argument. I don't see it as some sort of evil communist conspiracy or whatever it is you are accusing him of.

 

[Voo]

Free upgrades is a fair argument. I don't see it as some sort of evil communist conspiracy or whatever it is you are accusing him of.

In both cases the solution he's offering is "Upgrade to a newer version" which isn't that different. Sure MS is demanding money for it, but that's their business and the only solution there seems to be "Give newer versions for free" or "backport all new features to older versions" (which is basically the same as #1).

Apart from how you get the newer version, the policies of canonical/redhat/ms in that regard are pretty much the same.

PS: Interesting observation: I wager only a US american would bring "evil communist conspiracies" into this discussion - one example of how media and culture influences people

 

[Puppies04]

Google, amazon, yahoo, and other companies that need massive servers.

If you think google, yahoo and amazon shop for their hardware the same places you do then you are mistaken. Have you seen the price of enterprise hardware.

 

[Nothinman]

Which doesn't change the fact that no linux vendor does support 10 year old distributions either. The only difference is that MS demands payment for their new releases with which you personally have a problem, but that's about it.

Also backporting costs money and it's a rather bad business plan to backport new feature to your 10year old OS that's already superseded by not one but two versions. You can invest that time better in implementing new stuff in the current OS. Or to make another comparison to the linux world: Canonical doesn't backport and support most of the new features to their LTSes either.

MS releases service packs for free which add new features to virtually every release, they're choosing to support XP for over 10 years and they already do R2 releases of OSes which are just minor updates to existing OSes so the onus still falls on them. And that doesn't change anything, anyway. The fact that Linux distros are more flexible, released more frequently and without charge are just several reasons why Linux is better overall.

Apart from how you get the newer version, the policies of canonical/redhat/ms in that regard are pretty much the same.

Which is the key point here and the reason why MS (and XP more specifically) is hindering progress in this area.

 

[Voo]

If you think google, yahoo and amazon shop for their hardware the same places you do then you are mistaken. Have you seen the price of enterprise hardware.

Actually they do.. somewhat. They buy (presumably not only though) the HDDs that don't endure the manufacturers QC tests for a dime a dozen, so they're using consumer class hardware - which isn't that surprising considering how much space they need, redundancy and cheap hardware is cheaper than still needing redundancy but drives that cost 20times more from a gb/$ point of view.

And that doesn't change anything, anyway. The fact that Linux distros are more flexible, released more frequently and without charge are just several reasons why Linux is better overall.

Ah here we go. Always nice to have some linux extremist around that will try to derange every topic, unimportant how offtopic it gets. Now obviously someone else has to mention the 10% market share of linux as a counter argument as the initiation for a nice flamefest, but alas I fear that was interesting about 15 years ago, so I think I'll go with:

There are "extremists" in the free software world, but that's one major reason why I don't call what I do "free software" any more. I don't want to be associated with the people for whom it's about exclusion and hatred.

 

[taltamir]

If you think google, yahoo and amazon shop for their hardware the same places you do then you are mistaken. Have you seen the price of enterprise hardware.

Google explicitly states that it doesn't use enterprise drives. They use large banks of consumer drives. Exactly because of the price difference you mentioned, it is simply not worth it.

Google wrote their own file system which is patented, trade secret, and their greatest advantage. And lets them protect their data even on consumer hardware.

 

[Nothinman]

Ah here we go. Always nice to have some linux extremist around that will try to derange every topic, unimportant how offtopic it gets. Now obviously someone else has to mention the 10% market share of linux as a counter argument as the initiation for a nice flamefest, but alas I fear that was interesting about 15 years ago, so I think I'll go with:

Just because you don't like the reasons doesn't make them any less valid or off-topic.

 

[Anteaus]

I think he just means that the flexiblity of linux has nothing to do with why EFI didn't go mainstream sooner or why hard drives haven't hit 5+ TB already. No one would deny the advantages of Linux over Windows in this case, but this isn't a Windows Versus Linux thread. If you had evidence that directly implicates Windows in impeding EFI rollout then by all means provide it, but pounding on Windows in the hopes that people will see how awesome Linux is doesn't actually provide anything of substance to the thread.

EFI possibly has a greater role in other chipsets (I'm ignorant in this regard), but as far as x86 is concerned the economics have obviously worked against it until recently. Not having EFI has not stopped larger drives from appearing on any platform. Apple has been using EFI for a long time and so far I don't see them having any special privilages in the form of larger than average drive size or performance.

 

[Modelworks]

no larger hard drives now because the market price for them wouldn't be justified to the majority of customers.

 

[Nothinman]

I think he just means that the flexiblity of linux has nothing to do with why EFI didn't go mainstream sooner or why hard drives haven't hit 5+ TB already. No one would deny the advantages of Linux over Windows in this case, but this isn't a Windows Versus Linux thread. If you had evidence that directly implicates Windows in impeding EFI rollout then by all means provide it, but pounding on Windows in the hopes that people will see how awesome Linux is doesn't actually provide anything of substance to the thread.

EFI possibly has a greater role in other chipsets (I'm ignorant in this regard), but as far as x86 is concerned the economics have obviously worked against it until recently. Not having EFI has not stopped larger drives from appearing on any platform. Apple has been using EFI for a long time and so far I don't see them having any special privilages in the form of larger than average drive size or performance.

It's not a Linux vs Windows thread, however if OS X, Linux, FreeBSD or really anything other than Windows was the dominant consumer OS I think EFI or something else like LinuxBIOS/coreboot would've largely replaced the legacy BIOS years ago which has an affect on all of this.

So maybe it's more of a Windows vs everything else thread, because I do think Windows is one of the main, contributing factors to the slow production of >2TB drives because of its lack of EFI support. Why would a motherboard manufacturer produce EFI boards when the primary consumer of their products is running an OS that won't be able to use it? That wouldn't make any business sense.

Apple has been using EFI for a long time and so far I don't see them having any special privilages in the form of larger than average drive size or performance.

Because despite the proliferation of iOS-based devices, they still only hold a very small percentage of the overall consumer market. I guess they haven't deemed it worthwhile for them to pick a hard disk partner to produce "Mac-only" hard disks that are >2TB like they did for motherboards. Probably because booting from >2TB drives isn't a deal breaker for anyone. It would be nice, but if you have that much data in videos or whatever, you probably want them on a physically separate volume from the OS anyway.

 

[taltamir]

While windows requires EFI to boot from GPT, and everyone else can boot GPT from BIOS, this is really not the issue.
How many people use a 2+TiB drive as a boot drive?
2+TiB drives are absolutely essential for bulk storage, every top of the line drive in terms of size is always snatched up by datacenters at a ridiculous cost (typically over 3x the $/GB than the second largest).

The limitations were really in hardware. larger address controllers exist and easily solve the ability to address larger amounts of 512B Sectors. Butt he real problem is reliability. 4K drives address that by vastly improving the ECC on the drives.