Saturday, November 27, 2010

24 Terabytes?

Now is this taking us forward a bit faster than stated by the updated version of Moore's Law?

The technology, when applied to current density HDD (with areal density of about 500Gbits / square inch), will result in an 8-fold increase in the recording density. This means that we could see HDD with capacities of 24TB in the future.

3 comments:

Graeme. said...

In my humble opinion, people aren't concerned with their velocity at any given point - what interests us is our acceleration - it's what drives us to succeed as a species (and what threatens to wipe us out).

Moore's law talks about acceleration - exponential progress, rather than sequential. The HDD tech innovation you spotted seems significantly more aggressive than Moore might have predicted, but I don’t think demand will be a problem for this big increase in storage supply.

We're almost at the point where any media’s on demand - everything through the net. You want a film, don't go to HMV to buy it - you just download it from iTunes. As internet speeds increase, so does the quality of media, which increases the size of the files you need to download, which requires a faster internet speed and so on. As a result, piles of DVDs and CDs will be replaced by files in media libraries. (it’s already happening in a huge way)

A couple of years ago , 1TB sounded like a stupidly large amount of storage - now I have that much at home(and that's relatively small).
I do think home storage will also become a thing of the past with internet speeds so fast that access to data on the net will be unrecognizable from that of your local disk. People will have net space rather than local space.

Neal Asher said...

Graeme, I think there's another law kicking in too: crap expands to fill the space available. I look at my two photograph albums for the 70s & 80s, then compare them to thousands of photos and video clips I have stored on this computer.

Yeah, people will have net space, but when we get to the stage of being able to store all our personal data in say a watch, or maybe one link of the strap...

AngryMurloc said...

I wouldn't know what to put on 24 TB's..