Exploring the future of HDD tech

Just twenty years ago, hard drives as we know them now didn’t exist. I remember my very first computer, a Commodore 64, didn’t even have built-in data storage capability. The only options for holding my programming creations were a tape drive or floppy disk drive with media that held less than 1MB.

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Throughout my years in the tech industry, I’ve been amazed at the rate of growth of hard drive technology. In the early 90’s I was supporting laptops with 2GB hard drives, and now it’s not uncommon for models to come equipped with 250GB hard drives for a much lower cost. Of course the size of media files has grown to the point where it’s necessary to keep exponentially expanding data storage size.

All of the major HDD manufacturers are working to find the future of data storage and already have a few promising technologies in development.

Here are the big contenders in future data storage tech to watch over the next several years:

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Bit-patterned media (BPM) – A breakthrough technology unveiled last month by Toshiba, BPM divides the magnetic recording surface of a drive into tiny, uniform sections and arranges those sections into patterns of rows. The process allows for a storage capacity that would equate to 25 terabytes of storage capacity on a 3.5” drive. Unfortunately, reading and writing bits from the tiny sections is not yet possible with current technology, so it remains to be seen if Toshiba can develop this storage method to the point where it’s actually feasible by 2013 as they’ve predicted.

Heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) – Developed by Fujitsu in 2006, HAMR uses lasers to produce a thermal reaction on highly stable magnetic materials like iron platinum alloy. Seagate has been involved in recent developments of this technology, and forecasts a potential storage capacity of 200 – 300 terabytes per drive by 2025. To put this in perspective, a 200 TB HDD would have the capability to hold 500,000,000 average MP3 files.

The question is whether or not HDDs will survive future advancements in flash memory technology. Just last week, Hewlett Packard and Hynix Semiconductor announced a joint venture developing yield resistive random-access memory known as ReRAM. Some industry analysts believe that this type of technology could hold the key to the future of storage technology because it has the potential of functioning as both memory and HDD storage. There is no timeline currently available on when to expect ReRAM technology to truly emerge, but if the breakthrough occurs it could make hard drives obsolete.

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Whatever happens, these advances in technology will be pretty amazing to watch. Stay tuned!

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