but the manufacturers have for some reason been using that headroom to build drives the same capacity with fewer platters, rather than larger capacity.
Heat dissipation and power consumption is getting to be a big thing these days. The storage appliance people are having trouble with packing in large numbers of drives into enclosures now because of this. As areal density gets higher, the effects of vibration are also getting to be pretty significant. There is video of somebody at Sun with monitoring software running on a SAN that could actually detect somebody making a loud noise nearby from the increase in access time due to vibration.
Originally Posted By: peter
Presumably part of the reason is the thing with traditional partition tables only dealing with drives up to 2TB, but that can't be the whole story (people have had RAID arrays >2TB usable for a while)
If PC manufacturers ever move away from the ye olde PC BIOS and on to something like EFI with GPT support then 2TB+ drives wouldn't be a problem.
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