I'm only guessing here, but maybe 95mm platters (that's their actual diameter in so-called 3.5" HDDs) are too large for reliability at current areal densities. Will there be an era of 2.5" desktop drives??? There have been 2.5" server drives since 2004 (Seagate Savvio).
I'm not saying we should just put laptop drives into desktops - my thinking is that, like 2.5" server drives, 2.5" desktop drives should be thicker (for robustness and to accommodate more platters) and have faster seeks than laptop drives. Of course, going this way would bring us closer to losing the capacity advantage to SSDs, but reliability is more critical.
I'm not saying we should put 2.5" server drives in desktops, either, because aside from the cost, server drives are optimised for different usage patterns than desktop drives.
I suppose we already have a 2.5" desktop drive in the form of the Western Digital VelociRaptor, but that's an expensive 10kRPM product.
I'm not saying we should just put laptop drives into desktops - my thinking is that, like 2.5" server drives, 2.5" desktop drives should be thicker (for robustness and to accommodate more platters) and have faster seeks than laptop drives. Of course, going this way would bring us closer to losing the capacity advantage to SSDs, but reliability is more critical.
I'm not saying we should put 2.5" server drives in desktops, either, because aside from the cost, server drives are optimised for different usage patterns than desktop drives.
I suppose we already have a 2.5" desktop drive in the form of the Western Digital VelociRaptor, but that's an expensive 10kRPM product.