Slow (~ 60 rpm), high capacity, 5.25" drive

[gardener]

I’ve always been curious why drive manufacturers have not produced a hard drive that is super slow and with a massive capacity.

I may be mistaken, but it is my understanding that a low revolutions per minute would extend the life of a drive, even enabling its platter size to increase in diameter, and possibly lowering power usage.

I imagine a 5.25 inch drive with a massive capacity that could be used as a backup drive, that would be powered down most of the time by the computer.

I could understand that a drive like this would not be in WDC business strategy.

However, I would think a very slow drive would not compete with their other product offerings, but would be a great product for online archiving.

Is this technically possible?

[VirtuaL]

This is a really good idea. Nowadays many of us going for silent operations. Using HTPCs, running applications which takes long time with low HDD usage meanwhile sleeping in the same room, antivirus softwares running background checks at idle, and my list going on and on… I can wait few more millisecond as an exchange the klickling sounds. In overall im satisfied with WD products but we can not do any personalisations about speeds and such.

[DavidSucesso]

how could you expect to loose only a few milliseconds ?? i understand what you are talking about but think for a minute … normaly backup drives even the most size  are with 5400 rpm… and you are talking about one with 60 ??? rpm   ONLY 60 O.o?   even the most old drive that i have is 100 megs from 1990 and its a 3600rpm drive lol  … 60 rpm drive would stop the computer completely from responding lol, errors and bluescreens in theory and the actuator arm would crash into the platters because of the poor lifting force lol

[Kramy]

60rpm? Isn’t that basically what tape backup is? (or close to?)

But doesn’t tape backup have quite a bit more density than platters?

Platters are suited to data that is updated regularly and at random… they’re resilient, even when used over and over and over. They have their niche… I doubt it can be expanded to what the OP suggests.

[psusi]

It’s called the law of diminishing returns.  Pushing the rotation speed envelope usually means they have to drop the areal density a bit, but cutting the speed by a factor of 10 does not mean you can increase the areal density by a factor of 10 ( or even 2 ).

[jubei04]

[ThePizzaMatrix]

60 (Sixty) RPM hard drive??? SOUNDS AWESOME!!! I can’t wait for the experience that will be to take 30 minutes to save just 100MB of data into it!!!