Submission + - What happened to 5.25" hard drives? 12
indolering writes: "While scouring the usual suspects for cheap a HD I got to thinking about the old 5.25" hard drives of the 90's. I'm on a tight budget (as is everyone else these days) but I don't have room for another 3.5" hard drive. So I have to get an exponentially larger drive or an eSATA case. Since 5.25" inch disks have roughly twice the surface area, why wouldn't we still be making these suckers? The larger capacity would allow for more bad sectors/manufacturing defects, the SOHO, media center, and vanilla consumer NAS market doesn't seem to care if they are larger; users just hide the units behind the couch or stick them into a supplies closet. Is it more economical because of part overlap between the 2.5" and 3.5" disks, is the additional raw material more expensive than just increasing memory density, what?"
