In a world where digital information is more than doubling in size every two years, storage technology is experiencing a myriad of challenges to keep pace with the increasing demands for efficient and cost-effective methods to create, capture, manage and save all of this data.
So says Khalid Wani, Western Digital sales director, branded business, Middle East, Africa and India, who points out that, fortunately, computer storage technology is evolving with hard disk drives (HDD).
Though the HDD market has suffered a setback from the Thailand floods, Wani notes that multiple streams of future innovations are being explored by scientists and engineers to evaluate possibilities as the path is paved for tomorrow's standards and volumes.
Gartner believes that 20 million to 30 million HDDs will be taken out of the planned production of 180 million HDDs in the fourth quarter of 2011, and says this estimate could worsen.
“No one knows when production at any of the facilities in Ayutthaya and elsewhere will resume. The high-water mark of the floods remains unknown, and meteorologists predict additional high tides and monsoons in the region during the coming weeks. If the drive makers deplete global inventories, they might manage to ship 170 million HDDs in [the fourth quarter of 2011] - and even this figure is not certain,” Gartner said last month.
According to Western Digital, digital content generated in 2010 alone was more than all the data created in the previous 5 000 years.
It adds that, given the 1.8 trillion gigabytes in 500 quadrillion 'files' predicted for this year, the digital universe represents nearly as many bits of information as there are stars in the physical universe.
“Despite the global recession, in 2010, the digital universe set a record, cracking the zettabyte (ZB) barrier, and is expected to grow to 1.8ZB this year,” says Wani.
“For a visual image, this would look like a stack of DVDs reaching from the Earth to the moon and back. By 2020, our digital universe will be 44 times as large as 2009. Metaphorically, the stack of DVDs would now reach halfway to Mars,” he adds.
Wani believes that as capacity and density requirements spiral upwards, storage companies face barriers with current technical standards.
“Building the bridge to future technologies presents challenges for both traditional drives and solid state drives (SSDs). For SSDs, as NAND flash reaches semiconductor limits for lithographies below 1X nanometers, new technologies such as vertical NAND or 3D stackable NAND are striving to extend NAND flash technology.”
Other technologies contending to succeed NAND include 3D Resistive RAM (RRAM), Phase Change Memory and Spin-Transfer Torque Magnetoresistive RAM, he adds.
“Hard drives presently hover at maximum capacities of 3TB in the 3.5-inch form factor and lesser capacity for drives of a smaller footprint. As traditional drive recording begins to reach the ceiling of magnetic properties, several technologies are on the horizon to provide storage options.
“As different storage methods come under review, what the hard drives of tomorrow will look like remains to be seen,” he concludes.
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