In most cases the computer industry moves forward all the time – you get faster processors, better video cards, more spacious hard drives, etc. Sometimes, however, there’s a step back here and there only to make two steps forward a bit later. This seems to be the case of Seagate – recently company representatives have hinted that Seagate might go back to making 5.25-inch hard drives in the near future.
In case you don’t know or remember, 5.25-inch hard drives were popular in the 1980s but they were then gradually replaced by the smaller, faster and cooler 3.5-inch hard drives in the 1990s. So why does Seagate think of going back to the 1980s? The answer is simple – cloud storage. According to Seagate most of the data that is stored in the cloud is accessed very rarely, which eliminates the need for fast hard drives. In fact according to the company slower, more spacious, cheaper and cooler hard drives can do the same job – hence we may soon get hard drives with 5.25-inch platters inside. The move will have a positive side too – by using current technologies Seagate can expand the capacity of 5.25-inch drives to 15 TB, which will perfectly meet the needs of various cloud services.
It remains to be seen what follows but given the benefits listed we may soon see 5.25-inch hard drives to make a glorious comeback onto the computer hardware market.
Source: Seagate