The traditional spinning hard drive is far from dead, at least if HGST has anything to say about it. The company has just announced a 1.5TB hard disk that will be the densest drive of its kind, with 694GB of storage packed into every square inch.
The announcement might come across as somewhat peculiar to those of you who feel spinning hard drives should go the way of the Dreamcast and 'N SYNC, but for now at least, there are still many situations where a traditional HDD beats a solid-state drive.
"Contrary to popular belief, the mobile hard drive market is not being replaced by SSDs. We continue to invest in and serve both the traditional 9.5mm and 7mm thin and light HDD mobile markets as they offer the best cost-per-GB, performance and proven product reliability for high-capacity, mainstream, Ultrabook and A/V content creation notebook markets," said Brendan Collins, vice president of product marketing at HGST. "HGST continues to have a strong share in the 2.5-inch market and the new Travelstar 5K1500 hard drive is the latest addition to our broad line of 5,400 and 7,200 RPM 2.5-inch drives, giving OEMs, ODMs and integrators an opportunity to grow and differentiate their product lines."
Solid-state drives boast many advantages over traditional hard disks. Namely, they have the ability to access data electronically, while hard disks use an electromechanical process. This leads to, among other things, vastly quicker boot-up times and data transfer rates.
SSD's, while superior in many regards, also suffer from several weaknesses. One of the biggest causes of data loss on SSD's is glitchy firmware, something that rarely causes problems for spinning hard drives.
