Happy Birthday to the Hard Drive - The Future of Hard Drive Storage
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One of the problems with hard drives is that capacity has increased, but the speeds at which it is possible to access hard drive data have not kept up with those increases. Currently, the only way to increase access times is to increase the number of read-write heads in a hard drive. These heads, however, are the most expensive part of a hard drive.
You may have seen some articles talking about the limits of silicon for CPUs, and that sometime in the next five to ten years a different substrate will need to be found in order to continue increasing the number of transistors on a chip at the rates dictated by Moore's Law. There seems to be no such problem with storage, however. A recent Newsweek article noted that huge gains in storage capacity at low cost could be expected to continue for the next 20 years at least. Imagine having a hard disk drive in your home that can store several times the amount of information as the Barracuda mentioned earlier. Or maybe you'd fancy a bracelet that can store "every album and tune you've ever bought, every picture you've ever taken, every tax record," suggests Bill Healy, an executive at Hitachi.
One development that could mark a real change for hard drives is ReadyDrive. This is a feature in the Windows Vista operating system that lets it use NAND flash memory as a disk cache. Accommodating this new feature, both Samsung and Seagate have unveiled hard drives that include up to 256 MB of on-board flash. You can expect to see these drives early next year.
They will probably appear in notebooks first. Hybrid drives should run faster and last longer on a single battery charge than ordinary hard drives. In a sense, they're a consequence of data access speeds not keeping up with storage capacity, thus making hard drives run more slowly. Samsung has said that the cache in its hybrid drive is 50 times faster than disk.
Hybrid drives should also last a little longer in general, since sometimes they won't need to use moving parts to access data. Additionally, hybrid drives will be more able to deal with the normal shocks a laptop experiences, and maybe even decrease the number of hard disk crashes. That's one frustration most users will be quite happy to do without!
In short, the future is looking very bright for storage. The simple hard drive has changed our lives in many ways over the last 50 years. One wonders if the creators of the RAMAC had any idea where the revolution they sparked would take us. What will our world look like 50 years from now, thanks to this now small but essential device?
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