Disk vendors are the heroes of storage
Disk vendors don’t get much respect from Wall Street, but they do the heavy lifting that makes affordable massive storage possible. And it looks like the hits will just keep on coming.
Hitachi Global Storage Technology is announcing a five-platter terabyte 3.5″ hard drive; and I just heard about a technique for building diode lasers that produce a dot size so small that a one terabyte optical CD is possible.
One TB in hand vs one TB in bush
Hitachi GST is to be congratulated on achieving the one TB milestone. According to the this morning’s Wall Street Journal (subscription required) HGST did it with five platters.
Seagate will ship a four platter one TB drive later this year that should also be cheaper since it won’t have an extra platter and two more read/write heads. Decisions, decisions.
Optical breakthrough
I saw in a TechRepublic blog this morning that a breakthrough in diode laser focusing is making it possible to build cheap diode lasers that can read and write dots that are smaller than the wavelength of the light they generate. This is huge. In a nanotechnology sense.
If you’ve been following the chipmaker’s march to smaller feature sizes over the last few decades, you’ve noted that they’ve been bumping up against this seemingly insurmountable problem: as feature sizes get smaller, they’ve had to go to shorter – now deep ultra-violet – wavelengths to produce those small features. Work has been going on with x-ray lithography for years, but the chip industry just hasn’t wanted to give up their tried-and-true optical technology.
What the physicists have created, as summarized on a Harvard website, is a nanoparticle-based optical antenna. They say:
Optical antennas are single or coupled metallic nanoparticles in which optical excitation of surface plasmons can produce very high intensities in the optical near field. . . . This design leads to a large intensity enhancement localized in the gap between the latter.
In other words, the optical antenna creates a very focused laser beam. How focused? It creates a dot with “subwavelength spatial resolution” meaning an 800 nanometer wavelength laser can produce a dot of a “few tens of nanometers”, or about a 100x improvement. Typically, the dot size is a ~5x multiple of the light’s wavelength.
Using this technique, the researchers invented
a photonic device which consists of a resonant optical antenna integrated on the facet of a commercial diode laser.
The scientists believe these antennae can be fabricated, using standard techniques, on current diode lasers.
They see applications for the technology in two storage areas – optical disks and heat-assisted magnetic recording – among other applications.
Optical disks you know about. Heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) heats small magnetic particles on a platter to make them easier to magnetize reliably, helping overcome the dreaded superparamagnetic limit. Smaller laser spot means smaller magnetic particles can be heated and magnetized.
The StorageMojo take
Assuming the technology can be commercialized – and that is no doubt at least five years away – we’ve added at least another decade of 40-50% areal density improvements to disk storage, both optical and magnetic.
It almost seems like yesterday when the first one GB 3.5″ hard drive – from Maxtor, I think – came to market in the early ’90s. So in the last ~15 years we’ve had a 1000x increase in capacity – 10x every five years.
Thus in 2022, we’ll have 3.5″ disks with a one petabyte capacity, if such a clumsy form factor is still in use. How about a 160 TB notebook drive? And Blu-ray will be a forgotten antique.
Comments welcome, of course. BTW, the first hard drive I ever had on a PC was a 5 MB Seagate. Whoa!
And we’re not even talking of Holographic 3D storage system here… I wonder where (and when) the likes of inPhase and other Holographic storage vendors are going to step in.
Now I wonder if there’s any truth in this link:
http://www.joystiq.com/2007/01/02/seagate-the-answer-to-digital-distribution/
The weak side of the HDD is not their small size (GB), but the fact that they die unexpectedly and usually loosing all the information on them.
With the world getting more and more mobile I don’t really see HDD of any size as very attractive. Maybe in data centers, but definitely not in notebooks and other devices.
The HDD in my home PC just died (yesterday) with error codes and everything, so loosing TB of data is not very attractive for home users either.
Do you want to loose all that iTunes purchased music because you cat jumped on your PC?
Come one, give us some SSD at good price and we are never going to look back at HDD again… not even at 300TB disks 🙂
This whole thing is like the old battle – the steam engine cars trying to prove that they are better than internal combustion engine cars… 🙂
In regards to what Miro said and his recent experience, I like the Dr. Fun take on the matter:
http://ibiblio.org/Dave/Dr-Fun/df9712/df971202.jpg
I think on-board SATA mirroring and ZFS are arriving just in time.
Maybe you should start thinking about some kind of protection (RAID? ZFS?).
Another thing is I belive network storage is a future – not that it will replace home disks anytime soon, but with better network coverage, speed and reliability year by year services like Bingo is a way to go.
Similar thing happened with e-mail. At first people were mostly using POP and keeping their emails on their computers. Now people are mostly using web email and keeping their email at providers. Why not to do the same with other data?
Nice link David 🙂
In my case I didn’t loose any important files – I hate HDDs and I usually keep 2-3 copies of critical files on different computers at home, but it is still annoyance not to be able to rely on your storage.
The reliability of the storage should be accounted as well – for example if I need to keep 3 copies of my files to make sure I am not going to loose them then we should multiply the price of the disks by the factor of copies:
$100 * 3 = $300 for a 300GB HDD
The SSD are starting to look more attractive now aren’t they 🙂 even at their current price point.
All,
Good points. I particularly like the idea that flash SSD’s might be reliable enough not to need RAID. Anyone have an informed opinion on that?
Robin
When they start storing my mp3 collection on single atoms, im going to worry…
What about flash? Cheaper, faster, and no moving parts to mess up. God the read times searching thru 300Tb of files and the defragging too lol