The most popular and comprehensive Open Source ECM platform
Let us know more
Storage: Terabytes on Pinheads
Since 1965, transistors have relentlessly halved in size every twenty-four months according to Moore’s law. Storage bits have kept pace, shrinking in size at a phenomenal rate. (Actually the analog of Moore’s Law for Storage devices is called Kryder’s law and it predicts exponential growth in the storage capacity of disk drives.) Advances in physics seem to point the way to a future of impossibly miniaturized storage devices. Over the last twenty-five years a computer the size of a large room has shrunk down to the size of a laptop computer.
The next generation of devices will be based on ‘spintronics’ where data is stored in the spin state of electrons. The new technology is called Magnetic Random Access Memory (MRAM). Albert Fert, Nobel-prize winner, predicts the new technology will “combine key advantages such as non-volatility, infinite endurance and fast random access — down to five nanoseconds read/write time — that make it a likely candidate for becoming the ‘universal memory’ of nanoelectonics”.
MRAM will consume far less power than DRAM and six times faster than SRAM in access speeds. These characteristics make it an ideal candidate for mobile long-life battery products.
At one time a Gigabyte seemed huge. Then it was the terabyte. And now the talk is of petabytes. Hitachi made an announcement of a four terabyte hard drive for desktops machines and one terabyte for laptop machines to be available by 2011. Hitachi also claims to have created the smallest disk-drive head, 2000 times smaller than the single human hair.
But besides the rules from Moore and Kryder, a more practical unnamed rule of storage is that no matter how much you have, you’ll begin to start running out of space within twenty-four months of acquiring the new disk drive.
