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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.

3 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. 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.