Looks like within the next couple of years, the industry will have access to 4 terabyte hard drives. The article below suggests that this could be possible by 2011.
Hitachi Ltd. says its researchers have successfully shrunken a key component in hard drives to a nanoscale that will pave the way for quadrupling today’s storage limits to 4 terabytes for desktop computers and 1 terabyte on laptops in 2011….
The feat, which Hitachi plans to present Monday at the Perpendicular Magnetic Recording Conference in Tokyo, revisits a technology known as giant magnetoresistance, or GMR, that was the basis of the work of two European scientists who won the Nobel Prize in physics last week….
“We changed the direction of the current and adjusted the materials to get good properties,” said John Best, chief technologist for Hitachi’s data-storage unit.
By doing so, Hitachi said it has created the world’s smallest disk drive heads in the 30-nanometer to 50-nanometer range, or about 2,000 times smaller than the width of an average human hair.
Other hard drive companies are working on similar technology as well, Rydning said. He predicted the entire disk drive industry will begin migrating to this new type of GMR-based technology in 2009.
Read the rest of the article over at MSNBC.com
Within the foreseeable future, users workstation will be able to house terabytes of data. How will company’s adapt? Will there users even need all this space considering most corporate data resides on remote storage servers? Organizing, searching, finding, rights management, availability, how will workflows be affected with all this data sitting out there? The next few years should be interesting with the storage needs and disk space availability increasing at such a rapid pace. Filtering through all this data will become increasingly dependant on how its organized and managed.
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October 16th, 2007 at 12:02 pm
Technology improvements are commonplace these days; processors will get faster, disks will store more data, network speeds will increase, etc. This constantly shifting playing field often creates an uncomfortable level of uncertainty for businesses. Technological advances impact a business from all angles, including internal operations, competition, and market opportunities. For instance, you may now have to consider if upcoming advances in disk storage technology will impact how data is stored and managed within the business and adjust your infrastructure accordingly. You may also have to investigate if the ability to store more information can be utilized by your competition to gain a competitive advantage for their product(s) or if there is an opportunity for you to do the same. Depending on the industry, it is also possible that a new technological advancement can impact the opportunity and livelihood within a market, or even eradicate it altogether. Change is as certain as death and taxes, whether the changes are a good or bad thing depends directly upon your ability to utilize it.
October 17th, 2007 at 10:00 am
Well Said!