Storage Gets Bigger and Smaller At the Same Time

This past weekend, I replaced a hard disk drive in a laptop computer. After mirroring the old hard disk using the Ez Upgrade Hard Drive Upgrade Kit I removed five tiny screws and voila!--I painlessly went from 20 to 80 GBs of storage in a flash.

Well, not technically a "flash." That happened later in the weekend, when I picked up a 2 GB flash drive for under $50. Putting aside how inexpensive storage is, what never ceases to amaze is how small it is. The hard drive was only slightly bigger than my iPod Nano (which itself has 4 GB of storage and is about the size of my business cards) and the flash drive is hanging from my keychain.

These minuscule storage devices make me recall my first hard disk--an 8 MB behemoth with multiple 8-inch platters that I needed help in moving around. The only reason I had the beast in the first place was that I had to write the user and service manuals for it. So tell me, when was the last time you had to read a hard disk owner's manual?

But storage memory isn't about how small the package is--it is mostly about how big the storage capacity can be. For instance, IBM researchers have just announced they have demonstrated a world record in data density on linear magnetic tape--the computer industry's oldest and still most affordable data storage technology.

The researchers at IBM's Almaden Research Center packed data onto a test tape at a density of 6.67 billion bits per square inch--more than 15 times the data density of today's most popular industry standard magnetic tape products.

According to IBM, the demonstration shows that magnetic tape data storage should be able to maintain its cost advantage over other technologies for years to come. When these new technologies and tape become available in products--projected to be in about five years--a cartridge the size of an industry-standard Linear Tape Open (LTO) tape cartridge could hold up to 8 trillion bytes (terabytes) of uncompressed data. This is 20 times the capacity of today's LTO-Generation 3 cartridge, which is about half the size of a VHS videocassette. Eight terabytes of data is equivalent to the text in 8 million books, which would require 57 miles of bookshelves.

For more information on storage for iPods and similar mobile devices (including an analysis of flash versus hard drives), see Tom Coughlin's article "Putting Portable Storage in Perspective".

Posted by Jon Erickson at 08:26 AM  Permalink