14 DAY TRIAL // It was bound to happen sooner or later, but most people were banking on later: Seagate will give SSDs a big push this year but dropping manufacture of a certain type of hard disk drive.
While there are hard disk drive units with platter speeds of 10,000 rotations per minute, they are rare, and expensive.
HDDs of 7,200 RPM are, thus, the storage devices one might expect to find in high-end desktop and laptop PCs.
Not for long though, if Seagate has anything to do about it. While normal PC drives will go on, those made for laptops won't make it beyond 2013.
In short, Seagate has announced plans to stop manufacturing mobile 7,200 RPM hard drives by the end of the year.
“We are going stop building our notebook 7200rpm hard disk drives at the end of 2013,” David Burks, director of marketing and product management at Seagate Technology, told X-bit labs.
That means that, while 5,400 RPM drives will keep shipping, the faster type of magnetic storage device won't.
It is a very clear way of saying that if someone wants a high-end notebook, they should get a solid state drive instead.
And here some may say that SSDs, while fast, are very expensive, especially in 256 GB or larger capacities.
There is another way of looking at things though: since storage devices have been getting smaller, it is easy to install two storage drives.
And since high-end notebooks have started to consistently pair a fast SSD (for the OS and important files) with a slower but capacious HDD (for the rest), the latter doesn't really need to be all that speedy. What's more, SSDs are much less energy-hungry, leading to longer battery life.
On that note, Seagate will release its third generation of SSDs in the later parts of 2013, so the focus should shift to them.
Nevertheless, while Seagate will stop making 7,200 RPM 2.5-inch HDDs, they won't disappear from the market immediately. There are, and there will be, stockpiles of still unsold ones, and it will take a while for them to be expended.