Disk Performance Improvements are Not Keeping Up with Capacity Growth

Here is a graph of relative capacity of hard disks v.s. performance.  Comparing performance of hard disks is not completely straightforward so here hard disk transfer rate measured in KB/s is used.  The performance measurements are hard to come by.  The transfer rates used here are from an excellent article at Tom’s Hardware that covers 15 years of hard disk performance and actually benchmarks the disks to get real performance numbers.  While the article is dated from the fall of 2006 and the fastest drive it covers is a 10,000 RPM Western Digital SATA drive the numbers don’t matter much when put on a scale compared to disk capacity.  Even if we tossed in a 15,000 RPM SAS drive manufactured in 2008 it would not even be noticeable compared to the growth in capacity and the article on Tom’s does a good job of driving this point home.

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