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There's No End In Sight For Data Storage Capacity (computerworld.com)

Posted by timothy on from the heat-death-of-the-universe-comes-to-mind dept.

Lucas123 writes: Several key technologies are coming to market in the next three years that will ensure data storage will not only keep up with but exceed demand. Heat-assisted magnetic recording and bit-patterned media promise to increase hard drive capacity initially by 40% and later by 10-fold, or as Seagate's marketing proclaims: 20TB hard drives by 2020. At the same time, resistive RAM technologies, such as Intel/Micron's 3D XPoint, promise storage-class memory that's 1,000 times faster and more resilient than today's NAND flash, but it will be expensive — at first. Meanwhile, NAND flash makers have created roadmaps for 3D NAND technology that will grow to more than 100 layers in the next two to three generations, increasing performance and capacity while ultimately lowering costs to that of hard drives."Very soon flash will be cheaper than rotating media," said Siva Sivaram, executive vice president of memory at SanDisk.

6 of 107 comments (clear)

  1. Reliability? by Tablizer · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I'll generally take reliability over volume. I wish they'd work on that more.

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    Table-ized A.I.
    1. Re:Reliability? by harrkev · · Score: 4, Insightful

      My home server has around 8TB of data on it and out of that probably 7.5TB is videos/music/games that I can redownload or rerip as necessary if I lose them.

      So, the time required to feed optical discs into a computer and/or browse web pages to get downloads is worthless? Some of us value our time, and don't seem to have enough of it.

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      "-1 Troll" is the apparently the same as "-1 I disagree with you."
  2. fluff piece is fluffy by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Insightful

    I spotted the url before deigning to RTFA. That bunch --all the "properties" in that stable-- specialises in fluff for "executives" and other lesser educatable beings. There's been no shortage of fluff on /. as of late. The softpedia "hacker"-flavoured bs is just as fluffy. And, well, just about every site that gets serially dumped here. Very sad. But it doesn't matter, for /. no longer really matters. Oh well. Keep up the cargo culting, new new ownership. You might get to keep the cargo cultists. Maybe post some more wired feel-good techno-fluff while at it?

  3. War of the marketing material... by Junta · · Score: 3, Insightful

    HDD company says HDDs are going to continue to be the best price/capacity for a while, and it's going to be awesome, traditional SSD company says that's bollocks and HDDs will be completely obviated in the same timeframe, and Intel/Micron say 'screw nand, we got something better'

    It's great to see real advances in technology (unlike the various BS 'revolutions' that are commonplace in pure software), but it would be nice if once in a while a marketing person said something straightforward and honest.

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  4. Will it ever get cheap again? by grumbel · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Back in 2011 I could get a 1.5TB drive for 45€, now five years later the best I can get is 3TB for 90€. Double the storage for double the price. If I just want to spend 50€ I only get 1TB. It's nice that we now have 6TB and 8TB drives, but they aren't cheap and so far haven't really lowered the price of the smaller drives and given how long this has already taken I am not even sure if HDDs will ever get cheap again before SSDs will take that space.

  5. Re:640K by spire3661 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Absolutely yes. I could harness a 1000 GHZ CPU, and 10,000 TB of storage TODAY no problem. IT would vastly increase my output. Yes, we need more, and that need is not going to abate for at least another 30 years without a quantum jump in storage tech. 4k/60 FPS video is BIG, imagine what 4K 360-degree VR video will take up, and then 8K. Its an unending thirst that will take us the better part of a century to quench.

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