If I were a hard drive manufacturer....
 

I would get away from having multiple disks in the unit, only use one, and sell it by saying that it's the smallest (physically) hard drive. Plus, it could be sold cheaper than the other drives because it would require less material. Honestly, the average person doesn't need 80GB, let alone 300GB, so if they just took out 1 disk from something like the 300GB hard drives, 1 it would use less energy to spin up whenever it's being accessed, also meaning less heat, 2 it could fit into more places, allowing more space in laptops or small-form units.

Well, IMHO, the average person doesn't need more than 10-20 gig (even gamers), but everybody likes to keep stuff loaded on their systems "just in case". As for making the choice, it's similar to their choice of OSs. Most people just use what they're given, and that's that. If it's a 300GB drive, no biggy, same if it's an 80GB. There are bragging rights, of course, but for the most part, people don't seem to care unless their computer tells them they are out of space.

In some of the more interesting service calls I've had since disk space became a non-issue (the 20GB mark for 90% of the population), the user is so worried about "wasting" space, that they tend to delete things they need, be it OS files, personal files, work files, doesn't matter. The drive might be an 80GB with 5GB used, but the fear of "running out" was so great, that they would do their own version of housecleaning, with varying results.

Probably worse than that, are the people that think if they can trim their systems down to a minimalistic amount of space, they'll see a performance improvement. In these cases, you can all but guarantee a reinstall.

Still, I don't think it's that important. Cost-wise, a drive is a drive, no matter how many platters it contains, and the biggest fear a drive maker has is reliability, not wasted space. Nobody wants to give the impression that they can't produce as big a drive capacity as their competitors, which is what would happen if drivemakers implemented your plan.

On the upside, all us folks that cram our drives with numerous partitions, backups, OSs, software and so on, benefit greatly from the lack of attention the rest of the users give to their realistic needs. I'm sure not going to complain if my drive costs $50 bucks less because joe shmoe doesn't understand his real capacity needs.

Then again, I've never been accused of being a real warm, caring-type android. :D

i hat it when nubs tell me my harddrive is too full and that is why my computer is slow.

and youre right, i like have a 120 gig hdd, i can put soooo many linux's on it...

Which is not what I started this thread about....

But do laptop hdd's have the same number of platters as desktop hdd's? I could really see laptops benefitting from having few platters, not so much desktops. Like I said before, if you have less mass, it takes less energy to start to get it into motion, meaning less of a strain on the battery. They also need to figure out how to make more energy-efficient displays though, those things suck up a lot of power. But then again, who wouldn't want a 3d display ( http://reviews.cnet.com/Sharp_LL_151...-31006240.html ) these days?

laptops have less platters, thats why they are smaller. also, in laptops, if oyu use disk cache, the battery will drain really fast, so lots of ram is a must, which is unfortunatly limited and expensive. one advantage for using linux on a laptop. id have a bunch of ram empty in windows but it still would rahter use swap for some wierd ass reason.

Not sure why smaller with less platters is going to do anything for you. Most people don't know what the inside of a hard drive looks like. Heat is not an issue to most people. Smaller capacity and cheaper is what I would expect.
If I can buy a 40Gig drive for $55 and a 80Gig for $61 why would I buy the 40Gig?

I guess you're right, the average comsumer is not rational. Honestly, I have Slackware running perfectly fine on my 40GB hard drive, but maybe that's because I have all of my music and videos on parts of my 2 80GB hard drives for Windows....

I'd really like to see some mfg's create some smaller drives. I can't tell you how many times (recently in the past couple of years) I've gotten ready to build a new machine and found myself wanting a 10, 20 or 30 gig drive and can't find one. The smallest thing they sell retail these days is like an 80 gig and when I'm planning to run just a few small apps on the machine, it's very wasteful to me having all that space for no reason. To say nothing about spending the extra cash on space I'll never use.

So I end up going to some place online that sells smaller drives and I end up paying through the nose because the shipping is outrageous, or I end up getting hosed because the drives they sell end up being DOA because it was so heavily used.

So yeah, I second that... I'd like to see some smaller drives being sold on the shelves for those of us who don't need all that extra space.

So are you willing to pay the same price for a 10 gig as an 80 gig? Are you willing to pay more for a smaller drive?

There comes a point where it's not profitable for them to make a smaller drive it may even cost them more to make a smaller drive. How cheap do you expect them to make a hard drive? Shelf space isn't free, warehouse space isn't free, It's a lot easier to sell 8 different variations than 20.

get a usb card reader and a 5gb compact flash card. they are bootable.

I don't think I'd be willing to pay the same price for a smaller drive as I would for a larger drive. Maybe if an upstart company that manufactures hard drives could make smaller drives to appeal to a niche market like mine? Surely there is a market for people who only need a few gigs of space???

In one case, I was building a DNS server for somebody... in another case, an email server. Neither of them would have any other data or programs besides what's required to perform the function. If the mail server actually grew, it would be trivial to add another HDD that could be used for the mail queue or local deliveries. I ended up using a 60 gig drives for one of these machines, when I really only needed about 3 or 4 gigs max. Hell, I would have been thrilled to have a 10 gig for something like this.

Considering the application, a flash card would not have been appropriate... it really needed to be a "real" hard drive.

Blinker, I hear what you're saying, and I'm inclined to agree with you, but I really really wish there was a big enough niche market for people like me.