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

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.

    1. Re:Reliability? by Distan · · Score: 4, Interesting

      The big purchasers of storage want the opposite. They prefer cheap capacity over reliability. All their data is replicated multiple time so losing a storage device is nothing to them, the data just auto-replicates to other devices.

    2. 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. If you have all the garbage it's no longer garbage by Overzeetop · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Garbage is actually filled with valuable substances. GIGO is more applicable to older, discrete entry systems which have specific analysis paths.

    Consider real garbage in your trash, or in transfer station, or in a landfill. It generally has no value - it's garbage. But at a larger and larger scale it begins to have, statsitically, more valuable material in it. Now consider minerals trapped in the earth. We regularly process millions of metric tons of earth to refine and process into the elements we need.

    A truck full of garbage is a smelly mess. An earth full of garbage is a resource which can be mined for nearly anything you need. That's why all the trash we put in Google has greater value as the total amount of garbage they collect increases. It's still garbage...but at that scale it can be refined into money.

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    Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
  3. 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.

  4. Seagate claimed 60TB by 2016 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    This post on Slashdot reminds me of previous post on Slashdot from 2012 about 60TB 3.5 inch and 10TB 2.5 inch drives by 2016. Again it was based on Seagate's 2006 patent on heat assisted magnetic recording. I think it is more realistic at his point to expect LTO tape to provide 220TB storage than Seagate making good on it's dream of HAMR drives. This latest claim should be an indication of how much trouble Seagate is having with their heat-assisted technology. They are essentially giving themselves a 4 year extension to achieve only a third of the results that they previously claimed.