I’ve been using computers for almost 25 years now (14 of which professionally) and if someone asked me to choose a single hardware component that hasn’t changed even a bit in terms of functionality since the day i ordered my very first system that would definitely be mechanical hard disk drives. Since 1989 I’ve used and tested well over 100 models (both consumer and enterprise ones) with capacities ranging from just a few Megabytes and up to several Terabytes but with the exception of SSDs and SSHDs (which is basically a marriage of both technologies) i can’t say that the way HDDs function has changed, not really anyways. HGST took a step towards changing that roughly a year ago when they announced the upcoming Ultrastar He6 line of enterprise oriented hard disk drives and today after quite a bit of wait we finally have the SAS 6Gb/s variant with us.
