In the hard drive business, time is short. It’s an arms war out there and the combatants are competing in many areas– capacity, performance, acoustics (practically a non-issue), price (at the low end), and bragging rights. Bragging rights go to the company with the latest in a series of firsts–first to market, first with the current top in areal density, first with a new low in acoustic output, and even first with proprietary drive diagnostics can earn a competitive advantage, all other things being equal.

On March 10, Maxtor briefed selected press on a new series of drives with the unprecedented per-disk capacity of 15.3GB. Three days later, on March 13, Quantum announced its own 15GB per platter drive.

Both companies claim to be first. Both companies were shipping sample units to OEM customers in March with plans to ship production units to OEMs in April. On April 3, Western Digital weighed in with a series of hard drives based on 15.3GB per platter. They didn’t claim to be first.

Does it really matter who is first to announce? First to ship? First to ship in volume? First to [ldots] what?

By the time you read this, it’s a practical certainty that most drive makers who haven’t announced their 15GB/platter drives will be getting close to making such announcements. It’s also easy to predict that drive makers will be pushing towards their first 22.5 (or so) GB/platter drives. We may be seeing drives with capacities of 20GB/platter (or 10GB/surface) because the industry (and customers) likes round numbers and because a round number target may be easier to reach than 22.5GB/platter.

Where high performance hard drives are often running at 10,000RPM and sometimes even higher, the new 15GB/platter drives run at 5,400RMP or lower. Where high performance drives are offered in SCSI and, in some cases, with native Fibre Channel interfaces, the best that these 15GB drives deliver is ATA66.

These new drives were designed and targeted for the low cost computer market, rather than for high-end workstations or servers. While they aren’t priced for the sub-$700 market with Maxtor’s 60GB drive carrying a suggested retail price of $329, Western Digital’s 45GB drive priced at $299, and Quantum’s 30GB drive priced at $259, it should be fairly clear that these drives are designed for midrange computers or for affordable capacity upgrades. Both Western Digital and Maxtor implemented their designs in 5400 RPM, a long proven technology. By slowing down the motors, the drive is given more time to read or write to any specific location on the platter. In a given instant, the heads have access to a larger portion of the disc. By increasing the areal density of the platters, while increasing the amount of time these denser areas can be accessed by the heads, higher per platter densities became possible.

Maxtor’s two new drives offer an interesting set of choices–high capacity and higher performance in its DiamondMax 60 and a much lower price point with somewhat lower performance in its DiamondMax VL3O. The DiamondMax 60 is a 4 platter drive that delivers 61GB storage capacity. A 2MB buffer (large for most hard drives) enables transfer rates of 40MB/sec. The DiamondMax VL3O is a 30GB drive that has a 512KB buffer. With a suggested price of $169, the VL3O may find its way into many mid-range systems. For many users, a 30GB upgrade for about $150 may make more sense than paying twice as much for capacity that the user doesn’t expect to use.

Western Digital’s WD Caviar 15.3GB per platter drives will also feature 2MB buffers. A variety of models, ranging from a 7.5GB version that uses only one surface to a 45GB version that uses both sides of three platters will be offered by Western Digital.

Quantum has taken the speed drop one step further, spinning its platters at 4400RPM. By further slowing the platter, reading and writing at higher densities may have been even easier for Quantum to accomplish than it was for either Maxtor or Western Digital, which stayed at 5400RPM.

Quantum’s lct15 drives will feature 512Kb buffers. The drives will be offered in capacities of 7.5GB, 15GB, 20.4GB, and 30GB versions.

An additional benefit was also claimed by all three manufacturers–improved acoustics. The slower drives can be expected to produce less noise than their whirling dervish relatives spinning at 7200RPM or higher. Additionally, technologies developed to further reduce sound output help to make these drives very quiet.

In addition, because the data on the platters is so dense, head movement (a major contributor of drive noise) may be more limited than it is on less dense platters. Maxtor has taken the acoustic issue a step further by offering versions of the drive in “Quiet” mode–an option made available to the OEM customer. Maxtor DiamondMax drives running in quiet mode score 2%-3% lower on benchmark tests than do the standard version of the drives.

In addition to reducing some of the drive costs by allowing speed reductions, the move towards somewhat lower performing, high capacity platters also enabled other cost reductions. For example, when compared to last year’s 7.5GB/platter drives, the amount of platters and heads required to store the same amount of data has been halved. The cost of platters and heads are a significant part of the cost of a drive.

Although promising high reliability, and there’s little reason to doubt that these somewhat simpler (fewer moving parts) drives will deliver high reliability, a number of issues may need to be considered. First, it may be worthwhile to question the wisdom of putting so much data on a single spindle. If a drive fails, the user stands to lose a tremendous amount of data. Even if backed up onto a DDS4 drive (not one that most users of these 15GB/spindle drives would use), restoring a 60GB drive can take two or three tapes and many hours to restore.

Further, some users may be concerned with drive performance. Locating a file on a surface that contains 7.5GB of data may take longer to seek than would data spread across many higher performance drives.

Additionally, the question of how to partition the drives, if at all, and what kinds of data can be used to fill the drives may also be considered.

Is there an optimal partition size? Is drive performance better if partitions are kept small than if a smaller number of partitions are created? What is the performance impact of using a single 60GB drive versus two 30GB or four 15GB partitions? These are a few of the issues that should be considered when installing or upgrading to these higher capacity drives.

The higher capacities of CD-ROM drives may force a different way that consumers will think about data storage. For example, a 61GB drive can conceivably store the contents of 100CDs, uncompressed, and always available for immediate playback. When compressed to MP3 format, many hundreds of CDs can be stored onto such a drive.

Similarly, the most frequently used CD-ROMs can also be stored onto a hard drive. When stored along with any necessary installation codes, a user’s most frequently used applications can be stored for easy retrieval in case they must ever be re-installed.

In some ways, the growth of hard drive capacities can be considered somewhat analogous to changes in the car business. Two decades ago, a two-sided disc with a whopping 360KB capacity replaced a 5.25-inch floppy drive with 170KB capacity. This was followed with a 1.2MB floppy disk and the introduction of a 2MB hard drive. A 10MB drive was followed by a 20MB drive and the capacity race was on. The early days may be thought of as cars with no trunks, followed by Volkswagens with tiny trunks in the front of the car.

As drives grew in size, eventually reaching the GB range, car trunks finally became full-sized. Today’s 60GB drives may be something like that of a 20 foot UHaul truck–lots of capacity and, for many, questions relating to how to use it. The inevitable move towards even higher density low performance drives and the eventual availability of these higher capacities in higher performance drives will make things even more interesting.