2015: A bleak anniversary for hard drives

Guruswamy Ganesh

Technology has undergone a remarkable change in the last 15 years. Were we to take a look at what was ‘state of the art in technology’ in 2000, we will see that since then technology has evolved radically.

In the year 2000, Intel released the first 1GHZ processor. Sharp introduced the first camera phone. And Seagate introduced the Cheetah X15, the world’s first hard drive to operate at 15,000 RPMs on February 23, 2000.

Since then, we’ve seen the advent of 15 core processors running at multiple gigahertz, smartphones with 35 megapixel cameras capable of shooting 4K UltraHD video, and the dawn of the social media (Facebook, Twitter and all of the other sites you use to manage your world wouldn’t exist for a few more years).

However hard drives still max out at 15K RPMs. That’s a long time to be stuck in place. Back in 2000, after all, “wireless” computing meant a mouse without a cord: Wi-Fi wouldn’t go mainstream until 2003. Netflix was shaking up the entertainment business by delivering movies straight to your home through the mail. Heck, the big battle in mobile computing was between Palm and Casio.

Why the sclerotic immobility? Isn’t all technology supposed to improve all the time? Chalk it up to the laws of physics, which are undermining the industry. Hard drives are mechanical devices: information is conveyed from a rotating platter to a needle-like head that searches for tracks, similar to how records and turntables worked.

Unfortunately, you can only push mechanical devices so far. Components break down or wear out, causing unexpected interruptions and maintenance headaches. Problems caused by friction, torque and air resistance magnify. Going past 15K would also disproportionately increase power consumption at a time when power consumption is one of the biggest problems facing data centers. More power would mean more air conditioning. In fact, if you think about it, hard drives and air conditioners are two critical mechanical devices in data centers.

Spinning faster is not an option for HDD. As the speed of the rotating platters increase, the wind resistance and hence power increases dramatically. Sadly, even with all this extra power, the performance increase is minimal, and with the power concerns of large data centers, the increased power is far more harmful than the improved performance is good. Even worse, higher HDD speeds will effect reliability and possibly require a reduction in capacity!

And I’m not the only one noticing this fact. If you check with Jim Handy of Objective Analysis, who canvassed hard drive engineers for the answer to this question, he’ll tell you the same. In 2012, Handy wrote, “I asked a number of HDD designers and got a very simple reply: it would take too much power. As the speed of an HDD increases, the power it takes to run increases disproportionately. These designers told me that increasing the speed significantly beyond today’s 15K RPM level would cause undue headaches in power management and could even threaten the lifetime of the HDD.”

With this understanding, it's not hard to understand why we have never seen an HDD spin more than 15k rpm. Rumors swirled that Western Digital was working on a 20,000 RPM drive in 2008, but the reported drives never apparently materialized. The drive industry has improved the platter materials and come up with ways to reduce the amount of turbulence inside of drives. Channels are enhanced to allow more data to get transferred per second.

Still, at some point practicality takes over. You have to accept limitations. (In a similar vein, attempts to commercialize tiny drives measuring an inch or less across a decade ago fizzled out because the necessary trade-offs weren’t worthwhile.)

What does this mean for hard drives in the long run? It’s not good news. We’re moving into an era where access to data is absolutely critical and building data centers and computing infrastructures to keep up with the volume and velocity of information becomes more challenging by the day. Think of it. YouTube wasn’t even founded until 2005—five years after hard drives hit their speed limit. The site now uploads approximately 72 hours of content to the site a minute. The concept of Big Data was in its infancy. Information needs to move faster than motors. Flash memory, which provides more speed and throughput with far lower energy consumption, is already filling the void in high performance data centers. You’ll see it spread across the market.

Data center owners have tried to paper over some of the inherent shortcomings of drives by storing information on the more easily-accessed outer edge of the platter but at some point the need for speed pulls away. Ships and trains used to carry packages, but now we have FedEx.

Don’t get me wrong. Hard drives aren’t going to go away. They will perform critical duties in the digital economy for a long time to come.

They just won’t be on the fast track.

(The author is VP –Corporate Engineering, SanDisk India)