An Interview with Seagate's Henry Fabian

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MikeC
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An Interview with Seagate's Henry Fabian

Post by MikeC » Thu Dec 10, 2009 10:28 am


whispercat
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Post by whispercat » Thu Dec 10, 2009 11:11 am

I'm surprised you didn't ask Henry Fabian about any new technological developments Seagate might be persuing to make HDDs quieter.

bradc
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Post by bradc » Thu Dec 10, 2009 3:05 pm

I was surprised too, nothing referring to noise at all!

More importantly though, where is my 10K SATA Cheetah to compete against the Raptor

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Post by Zenphic » Sat Dec 12, 2009 7:58 pm

Some interesting questions and answers in that interview. A few noise-related questions might have been a good addition however. :)

xan_user
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Post by xan_user » Sat Dec 12, 2009 9:47 pm

Most of the questions are all about silence! Or are they now making loud ssd's?:roll:

Why ask about the soon to be obsolete technology of rotating data storage?

Nice read, Mike.

whispercat
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Post by whispercat » Sun Dec 13, 2009 1:14 pm

xan_user wrote:Most of the questions are all about silence! Or are they now making loud ssd's?:roll:
Huh ? :? Which questions are those?
xan_user wrote:Why ask about the soon to be obsolete technology of rotating data storage?
Henry Fabian:
"Seagate will continue to take a technology-neutral approach as SSDs and HDDs clearly both have their place."

HDDs aren't going away anytime soon.

xan_user
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Post by xan_user » Mon Dec 14, 2009 11:45 am

any questions about SSD are about silent storage.
companies are not going to spend money on new ways to silence spinning drives anymore.
for what customers are willing to pay, and how nearly silent a decent drive is now, there's no room in the profit margin to R&D/build/market a quieter spinning drive. It would cost too much, and folks would just choose ssd plus remote (thus quiet) multi TB storage.

whispercat
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Post by whispercat » Mon Dec 14, 2009 5:00 pm

xan_user wrote:any questions about SSD are about silent storage.
Nope. Questions about SSDs are about storage, since silence then becomes moot. Questions about silence or acoustics are about HDDs. The questions in the article were about Seagate's entry into the SSD world, and about HDDs in general, and market share, etc. The questions about HDDs did not touch upon silence, which some of us found surprising.
xan_user wrote:companies are not going to spend money on new ways to silence spinning drives anymore. for what customers are willing to pay, and how nearly silent a decent drive is now, there's no room in the profit margin to R&D/build/market a quieter spinning drive. It would cost too much, and folks would just choose ssd plus remote (thus quiet) multi TB storage.
Funny, Western Digital keeps researching and putting out quieter drives: http://www.silentpcreview.com/wd-green-1.5tb

If, as you say, spinning drives are and continue to get quieter and cheaper, it just reinforces my point that HDDs aren't going anywhere, since SSDs can't compete price-wise, and won't be able to for a while.

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Post by colm » Thu Dec 17, 2009 3:50 am

xan_user wrote:Most of the questions are all about silence! Or are they now making loud ssd's?:roll:

Why ask about the soon to be obsolete technology of rotating data storage?

Nice read, Mike.

hdds are like crts, everything else is a marketed gimmick for the time being. Micron size dropping and multithreading is the only real thing to go after...and even then, pretending pinless grid array is efficient will double your power supply numbers too...


The 5-7 year guess by mr.fabian is off... I say another 12-15...
and if physics of that cute little silver 14.3mhz gets ignored again pretending memory and fans is a silent abyss just dispersing it....

it will be interesting long term, and that needs users...and that needs twenty years. :roll:

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Post by Shamgar » Tue Aug 17, 2010 12:19 am

whispercat wrote:HDDs aren't going away anytime soon.
Exactly. As with serial, parallel, IDE, 32-bit, 16-bit, electricity, petroleum, plastic, paper, cardboard, real humans, real food... HDDs are cheap, no nonsense and familiar and whether you like it or not, still the "standard". Those who call them "clunkers" are ignorant, dismissive fools; ye riders of high horses.

HDDs, SSDs and other high density storage for the general population are just dumping grounds for virtual garbage, filth, mould, diseases, virii. A typical modern OS takes up perhaps 30GB max (usually far less, if you avoid bloatware and custom install) so the rest of the other up to 1.5TB is a wastebin accumulated with one's waste of time and life.

HDDs, SSDs should be capped at say, 300GB max. That would encourage software writers, camera/video makers to be more efficient and stop the ever increasing race to the bottom (bloat/mal/crap/toolbar/plugin/spy wares disguised as "features" and "enchancements"; megapixel race; electronics industry rorts) to scam the consumers and make more easy money.

I personally prefer SSDs and I will get one soon myself. Actually, I'm going to get five of them, since they're on special. Anyway, HDDs will stay as complimentary backup and will remain thus in the industry for a long time to come. What about the cloud? Well, what if it rains and there's a storm, then you're stuffed. A 1TB drive (should not be sold) costs ~$80 and you can keep it offline and stored safely whereas online backup is exhorbitantly priced for comparable storage. And do you really trust the great big spy agency aka the cloud? Since lots of countries are still on slow internet connections, why would people waste more time uploading and downloading their waste of time and life when one can do thus on a cheap as chips HDD.

As has been mention numerous times, store HDDs in NAS in another room, then the noise issue from these medieval devices will be mostly irrelevant. Besides, it's hard to find very noisy computer parts these days; that is, if you are informed and care about such, then you will know what to and what not to buy in the first place. What concerns most these days is power consumption. Watts add up. They do. And they add up to dollars. And with carbon taxes and ETSs (which I'm against) being foisted on us by the academic classes, it's just going to get worse for families already struggling in these difficult economic times. "Oh, but the planet." As if they themselves really care anyway.

Excuse me while I stock up on SSDs before they introduce an ETS.

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