This year will see the end of the iPod Classic and with it the 1.8-inch disk drive, 90 percent of which are sold by Toshiba. This is a testament to the rise of flash memory and Solid State Disk (SSD) drives, but that’s not the only cause or the only result, because I predict that late in the year the venerable 3.5-inch disk form factor will hit end-of-life, too.
Apple is by far the largest consumer of 1.8-inch disk drives with most of the rest going into competing media players and netbooks. Toshiba might be able to keep its 1.8-inch disk business going to serve those alternate markets but I don’t think Apple will allow it, applying pressure primarily to keep those little drives out of tablets.
So far this prediction is a no-brainer, but the end of 3.5-inch drives is where I’m taking some risk. Margins are so low in the drive business that I think the surviving companies will be forced to sacrifice their extremities to survive. That means concentrating on the heart of the market, which is 2.5-inch drives. We used to think of these as strictly notebook drives, but today they come in all speeds, all interfaces, and with multiple platters into the terabyte range. They fit better, too, in data center racks and use less power.
Freed from having to support two form factors the disk drive makers will not only regain a little margin, they’ll spur a new generation of enterprise-class storage products using the new drives.
Understand that this NOT me declaring the supremacy of the SSD, because those drives are still way too expensive. There will still be 800+ million disk drives manufactured worldwide in 2011 and most of those will be 2.5-inch.
This prediction is gloriously bold. I’d have assumed that if 3.5″ drives were near end of life then we’d see some significant desktop offerings with 2.5″ bays. I’m always happy to be wrong, but though I see lots of 2.5″ to 3.5″ kits, I just don’t see much in the way of desktops sporting 2.5″ bays.
I have to agree with Todd. I’ll concede that we may see major builders like Dell phase in desktops with 2.5″ bays this year, and next year the 3.5s go away, so you’re just a little ahead of your time.
I could see this happening in a small way. One of our storage vendors showed us an early release of their next gen storage chassis that was ALL 2.5″ (each disk was lower capacity, but they could cram more of them in the same space and crank more IOPS out of them because their were more disks involved…pretty cool). But their ultra-high storage/low cost/low performance chassis was still loaded with 3.5″ disks…so you may be on to something, but it won’t happen completely in 2011…it’ll probably take a few years.
By the way…WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO THE FOIL DISKS THAT YOU WROTE ABOUT SO MANY YEARS AGO!!!??? (not angry caps, just emotionally charged caps.)
Indeed, where are the foil drives? In 2006 Bob said they were expected to be available in one year’s time. In 2009 Bob complained that Google wouldn’t buy them. Maybe Google didn’t buy them because they aren’t available anywhere.
If you truly have a much cheaper, much faster, much lighter, much more efficient, much higher capacity drive, your only problem should be keeping the things in stock as they fly off the shelves.
How do you think I found out that the 48mm drives are doomed? Foil is moving up to 65mm.
The Mac Mini has used 2.5″ drives for six years now, but I haven’t seen other desktop systems following it.
There better still be 3.5″ drives — I’ve got a Drobo that still has empty slots. And I want something bigger than 1.5 – 2 TB to put in them.
3.5″ disks still have 2-3 times the capacity as 2.5″ at the same price, and 2.5″ top out at 500-640 GB. Ok, that’s enough for most personal computers, but 3.5″ will still be the choice for the server or media NAS for a good while yet.
All of our blade servers use 2.5″ disks and as I mentioned above, enterprise NAS/SAN can extract more IOPS from them as well when they’re clustered…In the next 2 years, I can see a mix of SSD and 2.5″ disks taking over enterprise storage. For mobile, I can SSD replacing disks for most applications (by mobile I mean tablet/netbook/notebook). For home desktops, MOST people can get away with under 500GB, since most people are not amassing billions of MP3 files and movies from bit-torrent. There will probably be a market for cheap 3.5″ drives for a few years, but once they’re on the low curve of demand, their cost will meet parity with that of 2.5″
Actually, Seagate is shipping 750Gb 2.5″ in standard 9.5mm height units. Western Digital is shipping 1Tb drives in 12.5mm height units. Still, I’m craving the 4 Tb 3.5″ unit that must be just around the corner.
There are already 1.5TB 2.5″ external drives (Seagate GoFlex).
You’ve just laid-out much of the reason why I’m correct. Vendors want to sell more drives with higher margins.
I agree with Bob to a certain extent….. I would say that in 2011 development for 3.5″ HDD’s is over. Kaput. Still will continue to ship but in declining volumes. My crystal ball says Oct/Nov. 2012 is when major OEM’s announce end of shipment dates (2.5″ HDD’s will be 1-2 generations ahead of where they are now).
I think we can count this one as correct if we merely get to the point where the writing is on the wall for 3.5″. For example, if there are no new models coming out and a majority of new chassis’ have 2.5″ by default.
Plus, sales of things like this would skyrocket: https://www.arrowmax.com/storefront/product_info.php?products_id=274
Bring forward to January 2012. I agree that Mark’s measure is a good one to assess the correctness of the prediction.
IMO the major desktop OEMs will switch to smaller drives only if they’re less expensive, full stop. If Dell and HP can save a few cents on the drive in a desktop PC, they will, and if not, they’ll continue to demand 3.5’s.
Servers might be another story – Dell already offers many servers with the choice of 2.5 or 3.5-inch drives.
While the 3 1/2″ drive itself may soon go away, I suspect the 3 1/2″ form factor still has some life left in it. Server farms and audio/video professionals have invested a lot of money in this form factor. So the next step, i suspect, is for some enterprising soul to develop a dual 2 1/2″ drive RAID configuration crammed into a 3 1/2″ case. Unit cost remains low, reliability goes way up, power consumption does down, all with no impact to existing infrastructure. In a few years, when people retire their current gen servers, they’ll replace them with RAID servers stuffed with redundant clustered 2 1/2″ drives and high-capacity SSDs as super-fast caches.
Boy, that does seem like a bold prediction. But I can understand it. Most of my family has desktops, and they have big-arse capacity drives in them, because you really can’t get small capacity drives anymore. And when I look at their systems, with 500GB or 750GB drives, they are usually at, MOST, 30% capacity.
For the same price, a 250GB 2.5″ drive would mean they are at, like 60% capacity, so still plenty of room.
I’m on a i7 MBP, and I do a lot of media work that can consume a lot of space, and this thing is 55% full with a 500GB 2.5″ drive.
I do use a lot of space at home, and it is nice to have very, very large drives for media storage, but I bought some 1TB drives, like 2 years ago, and haven’t filled them yet. It’s getting close, so maybe the next upgrade is to 3TB. But that would probably suit me for another few years.
So, yeah, I could see why as a drive vendor you might want that to come to an end, and to focus on one set of mechanicals. But it’s very hard to envision.
It would seem that if this is the way drive vendors want to go, they can probably spur the move by “tanking” the price on the 2.5″ drives, and “upping” the price on the 3.5″ drives so that consumers make the shift themselves.
Unfortunately, given that storage is a commodity business, I don’t see how that works.
Maybe a couple of more drive vendors need to go out of business and get scooped up by competitors to make this easier.
Interesting prediction!
In the past, I’ve noticed that as soon as a hard drive price got down to around $100, it meant that particular size of drive would only be available for at most about 6 months, and that a jump to 4x or 8x capacity was imminent, back around the $250-$400 price point. That rule has held pretty close for over 20 years.
This time around, I was a bit puzzled, because 3.5-inch drives fell through the $100 price point, and then kept going, and going, and going… When I saw new 3.5 inch drives for under $50, I new that something different was up. Your prediction that this is the end-of-life for 3.5 makes sense in this light.
Good point. You can still find 500GB HDDs for under $50, and that typically doesn’t happen.
If I recall correctly, I read somewhere that the reason that HDD’s have been stuck at 2TB for the last few years is that PC’s use MBR for booting and MBR cannot address more than 2TB. Therefore, any drive over 2TB will be unbootable on every PC on the planet (excluding Mac’s)
To fix this PC manufacturers would need to move to an EFI BIOS (like apple already have).
I recall that one of the HDD vendors was talking a while ago about releasing a 3TB HD but that it would only be sold as an external USB drive to avoid consumer confusion.
Or something like that.
The 3.5 inch disk will die, but it will not die in 2011. As someone who deals in media content, I have 20 drives spinning at any one time. I just don’t see an affordable alternative. It’s not because I haven’t looked! Bob, you also are not defining what you mean as the death of the drive. Is that the day they stop shipping desktop systems with 3.5 drives? When CDs came out it in the 80’s it took 3 to 5 years for the “death of vinyl”, which has seen a resurgence in the past 3 years…
Totally nonsense for desktop computers in 2011. SSD is way too expensive, and 2″5 drives too small in size.
You complety forget that most people buy inexpensive products, not everybody can afford Apple products and be caught in Steve distorsion field of reality.
In a few years 3″5 drives will reach 10 Go, or maybe more. With explosive needs in storage due to VOD, digital photography with 15 MP cameras or video in Full HD, drives are quickly full of data. 2 To is not so huge today …
Most applications take big place on hard drive. A game may need 5 to 20 Go of drive space (WoW for exemple), Office too, and if you have a lot of softwares, even 750 Go is pretty small …
Even with 2″5 in a computer, you need an external 3″5 drive for backup and storage. Worse, each people have now several devices which all need backups (or it’s a risky life to not backup datas …).
So you are predicting the end, but there is nothing to seriously take over 3″5 in the 2 or 4 next years. Maybe after with bigger SSD, but the price is the KEY.
This “prediction” comes to soon. In 2011, 2″5 and SSD will stay too small, and SSD is too expensive.
I don’t think it’s terribly premature. SSD prices are dropping like a rock, and densities growing rapidly, and there is nothing to prevent that from continuing. As for 2.5-inch, the last laptop I got had a 500 GB drive in it, and they are now available with over 750 GB. They aren’t really pushing the current technological limit, so I would expect 1 TB of disk (or 300GB of SSD) to be the norm by the end of 2011. A terrabyte is probably enough for a laptop, at least for the next year or so. I am using only about 150GB of my laptop drive (I got a $30 USB 160GB drive for backing up my data) so far — and that includes my email archives going back over 10 years.
I am reminded of an exchange I had with my wife shortly after we were married (20 years ago next May). I saw a 1-gig hard drive (refurb) for sale for $850, and she was terrified, thinking I was actually planning to spend that much on a piece of computing equipment. But I knew that drive prices were dropping rapidly, and I was waiting for them to drop into a range I could more easily afford. A few years later, I got two 250MB drives for a total of $200, which was more than enough personal storage for the subsequent five years.
My most recent purchase of a hard drive was for a 1.5TB USB 2.0 backup unit (for my network), which I got for less than $150. For all practical purposes, I have enough storage for at least the next five years, or at least until the latest-and-greatest OS requires 500GB to boot.
One worrisome trend, though… I have been seeing a dramatic increase in the failure rate of hard drives, so I suspect that the current price squeeze is leading the drive manufacturers to skimp on quality.
Sorry for the “Go” (Europe), it’s “GB” in the US.
I think you meant 10 TB (terrabyte). I don’t think you can get a new drive anymore that is only 10 GB.
Yep, you’re a year ahead on this one, Bob. 1TB 2.5″ drives are just starting to reach the channel, which will open up some of the high end on blade and traditional servers like HP and IBM sell, as well as some of the storage vendors’ nextgen products. However, we’re just starting the 3TB-6TB 3.5″ cycle, and there is plenty of demand for same-chassis upgrades in the storage market.
I think you’ll find it hard to buy anything less than a 1.5/1.8TB 3.5″ drive very soon, if for no other reason than to keep something cheap in the non-UEFI marketplace. Aerial density will make that a dual-sided, single-platter drive.
I admit I’m on the edge of choosing replacement drives for my big box PC, and wavering between the 500GB 2.5″ and the 1TB 3.5″ drives, which are roughly the same price. I don’t think the power savings means much in my PC, but it certainly does in the enterprise market. However, 2.5″ drives are still a bit on the delicate side, despite the G-shock ratings the manufacturers love to tout.
It will be a while before I replace my 4 1.5TB drives in my RAID, but I’m waiting to see if Seagate brings out a new version of their NAS box that will utilize 2.5″ drives.
The tipping point will be 2TB 2.5″ drives for the home market. That’s when we’ll be able to hold the wake for the 3.5″ market.
Agreed. I just don’t see 3.5″ drives going away any time soon when the end user can get 2TB for under $100, and can’t come CLOSE to touching that sort of capacity in that price range with 2.5″. Of course the drive manufacturers might WANT 3.5″ to die, but end user demand for more and more capacity for dirt cheap means to me that something has to fill the demand with supply.
I agree with DavidB, as long as 3.5″ drives are significantly cheaper per GB they will remain popular.
Another factor not given sufficient emphasis in the comments is that the performance of 2.5″ drives is lackluster. With HDs being the slowest component in PCs we don’t need a speed downgrade, but rather the upgrade offered by SSDs.
3.5″ drives will die, but not in 2011 and not in 2012 either.
I hope this prediction is incorrect. Anyone with a laptop or a Mac Mini knows that 2.5″ HDDs drives cripple the speed of the computer compared to a desktop. Look at the MacBook Air… even with a slower CPU/GPU, it’s SSD makes the Air act faster than better laptops with 2.5″ HDDs. 2.5″ HDDs are a terrible deal in every way.
Michael- Apple use 5400 rpm 2 1/2″ drive in most of their laptop models and the Mac Mini, although some offer 7200 rpm drives as BTO upgrades. While SSDs are obviously faster than any HD, the stock 5400 rpm drives are really slower. IMHO, a better approach is to buy the lowest end Mac model that meets your needs, and then manually upgrade it with more RAM and a bigger/faster HD. Some companies (OWC) even offer SSD upgrades for MacBook Pros. Rick
3.5″ drives are the staple in the server market, and still run at speeds not available in 2.5″ drives (e.g. 15k). Possible that they might convert over to SDD or Flash, but the form factor will remain.
2.5″ drives might convert over to SSD, but the price is still way to high for the market to support it, and it won’t be coming down very quickly. Again, the form factor will remain as it is required by all laptops, and commonly used for USB drives as well.
Apple might be the largest single consumer of 1.8″ drives, but if Toshiba has other buyers than there is nothing Apple can do to stop them from delivering them to those buyers. Apple might get a specific line, but Toshiba could always set up alternate products to sell to others. So no, Apple can’t make 1.8″ drives go away – unless they were the ONLY consumer of such devices.
I also wonder about Bob’s “pressure” comment. There are numerous portable devices that require the 1.8 form factor and the ssd alternative is still way to expensive. Perhaps Bob sees a dramatic rise in the cost of hdd and a lowering of the fast ssd cost so that the 1.8 becomes ssd exclusively.
I agree with several posters here: it just seems too early for 3.5 inch drives to be taken off the market. If anything, I would expect the ‘death’ of this form factor to happen in 2 stages: first, the drive makers just jack up the prices on the bigger disks. ‘Hey, you want 3.5 inch? Pony up and make us some decent margins on it.’ If servers, media pros, and home users with lots of video buy the drives at higher prices, then the disk makers will keep it going. Needless to say, the tactic of raising prices only makes sense if some of the drive makers drops the 3.5 inch factor; the remaining one or two drive makers can then raise the prices.
After the 3.5 inch drives cost more, fewer will be purchased; Drobo and other NAS makers will switch over to the 2.5 inch form; and thus the drive makers will have to raise prices even more. This creates a kind of death spiral, ending in the discontinuation of the form factor when too few orders come in to justify keeping the last factory in production. But it seems likely this process will take a couple years at least to play out.
idk there are lots of SAS drives made in 3.5 i just picked up a ton of them and at that size the 600Gb 15k rpm are much cheaper
I have an alternate prediction, not necessarily for this year: The 3.5″ form factor will outlast the 2.5″ form factor.
Think about it; what do people want? Speed, low price tag, durability, large data size, small physical size. The 3.5″ beats 2.5″ on speed, low price, and large data size; SSD beats 2.5″ on durability, speed, and small physical size.
There is currently a gap in capability between the 3.5″ and the SSD where the 2.5″ drive has become very popular, however SSD will soon fill that gap. 2.5″ will not be able to compete with 3.5″ speed and price any time soon, and I’m not convinced that energy savings matter to anyone other than data centers.
What I’ve recently done is put modest size SSDs in my laptops and then jack a huge 3.5″ RAID 0 into my 802.11n router for backups and archived media. This is very cost effective and I get great performance. This sort of division between mobile and stationary storage will widen, not merge, which is why the 2.5″ drive makes less and less sense.
I don’t expect 3.5 to outlive 2.5, or even 1.8. The mega-trend here is toward portable devices, and a 3.5 inch drive just isn’t going into a smartphone or even a tablet.
The desktop computer isn’t going away anytime soon though! You’re exactly right that portable devices will all run on smaller and smaller drives. (SSD/flash, eventually.) However office environments, production studios, and non-portable network storage are all not in any rush to shrink their equipment.
For the home user, 3.5″ drives are more cumbersome.
A $150, 1.5TB external bus-powered 2.5″ drive is small enough to fit in your pocket and doesn’t tie up another power outlet.
I agree with the other poster that 2TB 2.5″ drives will be here within a few months and will be the tipping point for most users.
Yep! I think Bob is spot on but like many of his former predictions a year (or two) early,,, The scenario by pond seems like a spot on end game.
I don’t see 3 1/2″ die anytime soon. They still offer the best bit per buck ratio and cheap usually wins. Ok, small drives 2 1/2″ may become(or maybe already are) the top seller but there are and there will be plenty people (like me) who just need loads of space and set up RAID5/6 systems using the cheapest disks they can find.
Can’t talk about 1.8″ disks, never had one and don’t intend to buy one.
I’d rather see tape libraries die than 3.5 inch disks.
I agree that 3.5’s will go away but it will take a few more years. I mean people are still using tape for backups! Old habits die hard. I work for an enterprise storage company and we have been selling SSDs for a few years now. When they were first introduced, they cost 40x per GB compared to spinning drives. Now they cost about 5x per GB. Give it a couple more years and SSDs will take the place of FibreChannel drives. All others (SATA drives) will go to 2.5″ SAS.
Count me in the dissenting bunch, far too early on this one. Newegg currently stocks 10 3.5″ drives for every 2.5″ drive, no chance that significantly changes by the end of the year. It may happen eventually but form factors take a while to change.
I’m on a i7 MBP, and I do a lot of media work that can consume a lot of space, and this thing is 55% full with a 500GB 2.5″ drive.
I’m on a i7 MBP, and I do a lot of media work that can consume a lot of space, and this thing is 55% full with a 500GB 2.5″ drive.
Bob is, of course, right – 3.5″ hard drives will die – just as 8″ and 5.25″ died before them (and larger HDDs before the age of PC). The only question is when. They might start dying in 2011 – the definite sign will be introduction of 18mm – 25mm (0.7″ – 1″) Z-height 2.5″ drives.
As for capacity: the largest 2.5″ drive on the market is Seagate’s 1.5TB 4 platter 12.5mm drive in GoFlex external enclosure. You can fit 4 of those drives in the space occupied by the 3.5″ drive – yielding 6TB total capacity or twice the largest 3.5″ HDD!
With current mass produced technology, they can probably fit up to 10 platters in a 1″ height (same as 3.5″ drives) enclosure, yielding a 3.75GB drive – or better yet a cool 4TB 2.5″ drive with slight progress in aerial density. Two of those drives would fit in the 3.5″ drive space – an even cooler 8TB of space.
And what is to stop HDD manufacturers to fit 2 2.5″ spindles inside the 3.5″ size enclosure = a 2 spindle, 20 platter, 40 heads, 8TB monster. and all that with current, mass produced technology.
The 3.5″ platters will die. The 3.5″ housing size might live for a bit longer – with either one or two 2.5″ spindles inside.
“with slight progress in aerial density”
areal density 🙂
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