future of harddrives?

Question

what does the future have in store for disk drives in terms of size, capacity, and price??

Answer 1

Richie Lary, an independent consultant who once helped define Digital Equipment's VAX computer architecture and the storage line that was eventually acquired by Compaq and then HP, looked at expected hard drive development over the next 10 years and said he expects the typical 3.5-inch drive to have a capacity of 3 Tbytes to 7 Tbytes


Hard drive vendors are also looking at Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR), Lary said. With HAMR, the drives will have a laser to heat up a tiny spot on a new type of hardened media in order to let a bit of data be written before that spot cools down. Lary said Seagate estimates that technology will be available in 2010. But then he looked at Steve Sicola, a friend of his and the vice president of advanced storage architecture at Seagate, and said, "Steve said that's a little iffy for 2010."

Another key fact about disk drives is that increases in capacity have outstripped increases in performance and will continue to do so in the future, Lary said.

That is pushing the hard drive industry to move to 2.5-inch hard drives over time from the more typical 3.5-inch hard drive seen today, as the smaller size platter, while having less capacity, allows greater performance. "3.5-inch hard drives shipping today already are coming with 2.5-inch platters," he said.

Lary said that vendors are also developing 30,000 rpm hard drives, which double the speed of today's fastest drives. However, he said that the power requirements to get that speed are huge, and so vendors may settle for 22,500 rpm drives for now.

Other new technologies still being developed to improve the hard drive of the future include vertical MEMS (Micro-Electrical-Mechanical Systems) and termomechanical storage. With vertical MEMs, the single hard drive read-write head moving across the spinning platter is replaced by thousands of tiny heads on a single chip that moves very little. Thermomechanical storage allows the writing of data at the atomic level, as demonstrated last year by IBM.

Lary said holographic optical storage also shows promise and may be commercially available this year, but performance is very low.

While hard drive vendors are looking at new ways to improve their drives, others are looking at ways to improve the performance and data protection characteristics of RAID, Lary said.

The main problem now is that RAID technology was developed at a time when a 1-Gbyte drive was a big drive. RAID protects data by making sure that the data is written across several drives so that if one drive fails, the data is available and can be used to rebuild the failed drive.

Unfortunately, as hard drive capacities improve, the chance of double failures, where two drives fail at the same time, increases because of the time needed to rebuild the new large-capacity drives. "Bigger disks mean larger rebuilt times after each failure," Lary said. "And one hard drive error stops the rebuild."

That becomes a major concern in enterprise data centers, where the large number of high-capacity drives is causing the mean time to data loss (MTTDL), which Lary said is a better measure of reliability than mean time between failure (MTBF), to continually fall.

Answer 2

for Desktop Harddrives i think currently the biggest is 750gb and it will surely go up.. up to many terabytes... at first the price will be very high but eventually as hardrives evolution becomes faster it will only take a short time to change prices...

Answer 3

Well they now have hard drives called tyra bytes witch has as many mgs as are in a gb but its gbs in a tb

Answer 4

not much change capacity will go up the rest down....

Answer 5

They will continue to improve for a while just as they have for a while.