Does the consumer hard drive have a future?

• By Matthew Murray on October 1, 2012 at 8:11 am

The news this week that Western Digital has begun shipping a new line of RE hard drives with a maximum capacity of 4TB is terrific for its target enterprise users. This new drive, which is filled with helium rather than air to significantly cut down on internal friction, increases capacity by about 40 percent at the same time it decreases power consumption by 23 percent, and could thus be an outstanding way for businesses to meet their ever-expanding storage needs. Whether consumers will get the chance to see much benefit from these developments is another issue entirely.

Like it or not, there just doesn’t seem to be a ton of advancement happening on the consumer hard drive front. The last big announcement along these lines that I can remember occurred several months ago, when Western Digital announced its latest 10,000 RPM VelociRaptor drive. I got one in, tested it, and thought it was terrific — for what it was. But what it is, and about all it can ever be, is a fast mechanical drive that costs $300 and is buried in the dust kicked up by even the slowest solid-state drive on its worst day.

Once upon a time, not that long ago, this didn’t matter much. Enthusiasts and the manufacturers who catered to them understood that both SSDs and traditional hard drives have their place: the former for booting and running important programs, the latter for housing pretty much everything else. Ordinary people were content with the slower speeds — after all, they didn’t know any better, and it’s not like there was (or, for that matter, is) anything really wrong with hard drive data access rates anyway.

But two things happened about a year ago that might have provided the one-two hammering likely to end the hard drive’s dominance for good. The first was the flooding in Taiwan that slowed down drive production for months anddrove up costs so much that previously dirt-cheap storage became — gasp — expensive for the first time in recent memory. Because SSDs weren’t affected to the same degree, they became a lot more attractive to anyone looking to throw together a cost-efficient system. The outstanding speed was just a fortunate bonus.

The second occurrence was the advent of the ultrabook. The Intel-promoted, super-sleek laptops have strict storage and thickness requirements that don’t exactly exclude hard drives from inclusion, but also don’t encourage their use. Intended primarily for light, go-anywhere applications, ultrabooks (like their spiritual forbear, the MacBook Air) rely heavily on the cloud, so they can get away with the lower capacities that SSDs engender.

Add in the constantly accelerating move away from the desktop — even my mother, who hates typing on laptops almost as much as I do, told me this week that she’s considering ditching hers — and the picture looks like a bleak one: lots of systems, everywhere you look, but relatively little storage space that anyone actually owns.

I understand that a lot of people won’t be bothered by this. But for desktop “power” users (I hate the term, but it fits) like me, the types who prefer to embrace large-scale possibilities rather than small-scale limitations, things are about to get problematic. I store a lot of stuff that I tend to want access to on a second’s notice: hundreds of photos, music I can’t easily get from Spotify or the iTunes store, 13 years’ worth of e-mails, various and sundry other files that I’ve moved from computer to computer to computer over the last 20-plus years and look at or work with more often than you might suspect, and so on.

It’s not an unreasonable amount, by any stretch of the imagination. But it’s a lot given the current storage model of laptops and ultrabooks. And, what can I say, I’m not entirely thrilled at the prospect of having to trust someone — anyone — I’ve never met with keeping my files backed up. That’s my responsibility, and I want to be sure it gets done right and on time, and constantly sending stuff back and forth to the cloud simply doesn’t give me the kind of guarantee that helps me sleep better at night.

I need inexpensive storage, and I need a lot of it. And I can only assume that I will continue to need more as time marches on. I don’t care if most of it is fast — just that it’s fast enough. I don’t particularly want to have to put all my faith in SSDs; they’re one of quirkiest tech products I’ve ever worked with, and so many of them have inconsistent performance that I’m seldom sure what I’m working with even after I’ve spent weeks coddling one. To me, these aren’t ridiculous desires, but the industry isn’t catering to them much at all anymore. And things are only bound to get worse, especially if the trend away from consumer storage continues.

Of course, hard drives aren’t going to go anywhere in the short term. But it’s going to become even more challenging to convince manufacturers, and even just regular people, that there’s a place for them in even average consumer systems, so true innovation is going to become even more rare than it currently is. Why invest in this ancient technology when something shinier and speedier already exists and is gobbling up market share? So many companies have bet that demand for storage will decrease as prices fall and capacities rise that they’re making SSDs’ supremacy a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Good for them. But for those of us who understand the vital role the hard drive continues to play, and don’t think it should be shunted into the shadows like this, the next few years are going to be very interesting. Will we shrink our storage needs? Will something new come up to satisfy us? Will we be forced to buy enterprise hard drives like those in WD’s RE series just to get the latest and the greatest? Or will we continue to be odd people out as the world moves on without us? I don’t know, but I think I’m going to stock up on a few high-capacity spinning drives just in case, as I suspect, things get a lot worse before they get a lot better.