High-Capacity Hard Drive Roundup

The good old magnetic hard drive, with its rotating platters and flying heads, is still the mainstay for mass storage, even as other technologies seem to emerge. Refinements in platter materials, head technologies, and magnetic substrates allow hard drive companies to stay ahead of the cost and performance curve. With Hitachi and Seagate announcing plans for perpendicular recording technology, capacity and performance should continue to increase.

Hard drive technology is advancing rapidly, as digital media proliferates. Most of us will have multiple hard drives in our homes, including tiny drives less than an inch in diameter in handheld devices, compact drives in notebook PCs, high capacity drives in our PCs, and even bigger drives in DVRs. Rotating magnetic media is the storage medium of choice for our digital stuff.

Today, well be taking a look at three high capacity desktop drives: the 250GB Western Digital WD2500SD, 300GB Maxtor DiamondMax 10, and a 400GB Seagate 7200.8. Drives from Maxtor and Seagate use its latest platter technology, while Western Digitals drive uses its 80GB per platter technology built on a more rugged platform suitable for reliable RAID 0 operation.

Read the full story on ExtremeTech: High-Capacity Hard Drive Roundup

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