Potential Jump to 5TB HDDs

[Clocker]

I thought this was newsworthy but don't know how to get it in the news section...

Potential 5x increase in density:

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070521-new-tech-could-lead-to-much-bigger-hard-drives.html

 

[ddrueding]

...currently managing 140% of currently shipping drives at room temperature. I think it's an improvement, but that they are still a long ways off.

It will be interesting to see how long spinning platter hard drives can hold off solid state drives in the high capacity space...

 

[jtr1962]

Toshiba says they won't be debuting the new technology for another 5 years. Given the way flash RAM capacity is at least doubling each year we'll probably have 1 TB thumb drives by then. For me personally I'm more than happy with current drive capacities. They've well outpaced my storage needs actually. I'd much rather see solid state drives in the few hundred GB range than 5 TB conventional drives. Somehow I just feel my data is safer if it's not on a disk spinning at 120 revolutions per second. And the complete lack of noise plus miniscule power consumption of solid state are two other huge advantages.

Reading between the lines here it also appears that hard drive manufacturers are pretty close to hitting the limits of current head/platter technology if they need to resort to new technology for an only 140% areal density increase. I remember mentioning a few years back that magnetic hard drives would probably plateau at a few TB before their ultimate limits are reached and/or solid state surpasses them. That seems quite likely to be the case now.

 

[sechs]

As we've seen, the density doubling time is increasing. It seemed to take forever to get from 500GB to 1TB. In general, people seem fine with current drive performance, but really want more space per spindle. It'll be a tough row to hoe.

I think that we're more likely to see something like MRAM come to the fore before flash does. Flash is painfully slow, and the methods used to increase capacity tend to exacerbate this problem.