Why Hard Disks Dominate?

Hard drives have come a long way. Unlike other data storage media such as tapes, the hard disk continues to remain a favourite amongst the businesses as well as the home and home business users.

One of the most critical factors that can be attributed to the success of the hard disk is its adaptability with the changing consumer needs. A hard disk has evolved tremendously since its inception and it continues to challenge the other data storage devices.

Consumers’ data needs have changed immensely in the past decade. We create new data on an everyday basis and we want to store most of this data. Therefore, data storage plays a very important role in our lives today. It is almost hard to believe that when the hard disk was introduced in the market in the 1950s, its capacity was only 5MB!

With technological improvements, a hard disk’s capacity increased to 100MB in the 1980s. This improvement was widely applauded by the consumers at that time. However, if we think about the times today, this storage capacity would hardly seem worthy of appreciation, considering that 100MB storage space will not even be able to install an operating system on your computer!

Today, hard drive capacity ranges from 1GB to 500 GB, and the latter figure is still on a rise. You would think that high storage capacity of a hard disk would be accompanied by high prices. However, the actual fact is quite a contrast. As the capacity of a hard drive has increased, the price per MB has reduced significantly.

This decrease in price is primarily due to the improved aerial density levels of the hard disk. In addition, the performance of the hard disk has increased extensively. It is surprising to note that even though the technological advancements have made many previous technologies practically redundant, the hard disk has held its ground firmly.

The hard disk continues to remain the preferred data storage media on all computers because it is very easy to use. This benefit of a hard disk is derived due to its random access file structure. The random access file structure also enables the hard disk to perform faster than other backup media because the random file structure reduces the cataloguing process as well as the restoration time.

A hard disk can serve a wide variety of applications, interfaces, and connections, thereby making it almost ubiquitous. The users are increasingly demanding new applications that are more robust and the hard disk technology has responded to the changing consumer needs extremely well. A hard drive now has high spindle speeds, increased capacity, and an additional onboard cache.

The hard drive technology has also responded extremely well to the changing business needs. A 2.5-inch hard drive produces faster seek times, which is extremely useful when you want the applications to read and write numerous small files. The consumer electronics market has seen a significant growth in the past few years.

The issue of storage has become very important in hand-held consumer electronic devices and the users are demanding more and more storage to satiate their needs. Therefore, these devices need to support more functions and applications in order to store more data. Hard disks are playing an important role in the consumer electronics market as well.

Hard drives are replacing flash memory in digital cameras and portable music players because a 1-inch hard drive delivers up to ten times lower cost per megabyte than a flash memory. Home entertainment market is also experiencing huge growth. The digital video recorder has changed the way people watch television nowadays. Hard disk improvements are hugely responsible for this change.

Hard disks are now being designed in a way that gives consumers, content-providers, as well as the manufacturers the performance and features desired by them in the most cost-effective manner. The consumers can now enjoy high quality video because the hard drive features allow the streaming of the video in a way that enhances its video quality.

The media-rich mobile phones are also using the hard disk technology to support the various features and applications on the phone. Samsung introduced the first mobile phone with an 8GB hard disk in 2006. The phone allowed the users to store up to 2000 songs! The phone also offered USB 2.0 and Plug and Play feature that allowed the phone to be used as an external removable hard disk.