Harnessing the hard-drive metamorphosis
By Brian Dipert, Technical Editor -- EDN, July 8, 2004
The burgeoning capacities of 2.5- and 3.5-in. hard drives are having an intriguing effect on PC-software design, providing developers with the means to dramatically improve users' experiences. For example, streaming media players employ ever-larger buffers to surmount unpredictable network bandwidth and deliver a smooth audio- and video-playback experience. Companies such as SnapStream Media harness the hard drive to deliver ReplayTV- or TiVo-like PVR (personal-video-recorder) functions to TV-on-PC viewers. And DVD-playback software is beginning to use not only system DRAM, but also hard drives as caches of DVD contents, enabling aggressive power management on the more energy-consuming optical drive.
Despite these and other added consumers of capacity, however, hard-drive manufacturers still find themselves in a situation in which, as one speaker at January's Storage Visions Conference in Las Vegas put it, "the average PC owner uses only 10% of his or her drive capacity." Hard drives, like semiconductors, are also subject to Moore's Law-like trends that encourage drive vendors to push consumers toward ever-larger capacities. But a persistent underusage of capacity runs counter to this aspiration, especially when PC manufacturers are striving to cut costs wherever possible—a penny at a time, if necessary.
The hard-drive manufacturers' response has great significance to those of you designing non-PC systems. A slow but steady shift in focus is under way, away from increasing capacity at the largest drive form factors and toward providing reasonable capacities at increasingly smaller form factors. For example, server blades are now incorporating RAID arrangements of 2.5-in. hard drives (Reference 1); a growing number of slim and light notebook PCs are switching from 2.5- to 1.8-in. hard-disk drives; and the Apple iPod and its digital-audio player competitors are migrating from 1.8-in. hard-disk drives to 1- and less-than-1-in. drives from companies such as Cornice, GS Magicstor, Hitachi, Seagate, and Toshiba. And those same minuscule hard drives are increasingly displacing flash memory; Toshiba claims, for example, that it'll be able to squeeze a 0.85-in. hard-disk drive into a Secure Digital Card (reference 2 and reference3).
Microsoft's vision of the 8-Gbyte hard-disk drive inside each Xbox acting as more than just a cache for saved games is becoming clearer. Programs such as Xbox Music Mixer are storing audio and image files, and Xbox Live's hard-disk drive buffers network traffic and enables you to download various game enhancements (Reference 4). ReplayTV's and TiVo's use of the hard drive is well-known; sales-channel feedback suggests an almost insatiable demand from consumers for ever-larger storage capacities, and independent Web sites provide tutorials on how consumers can navigate the warranty-breaking process of upgrading the drives in their units. It's only a matter of time before digital-camera manufacturers will overcome their fears of hard-drive-reliability issues and begin embedding the devices inside cameras in conjunction with high-speed wired and wireless connectivity to PCs, instead of providing removable memory-card slots. Cell phones and PDAs will follow.
What will you do in your next design to harness the capabilities that hard-drive manufacturers are providing you? Will you simply replace some other storage technology with a hard-disk drive, or will you add a hard-disk drive to augment the system's capabilities? I'm sure many of you are brainstorming—coming up with ideas that I haven't thought of for a wide range of system applications. I look forward to hearing from you.
Contact me at bdipert@edn.com.
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