FILL 'ER UP!
One of the unsung and under-appreciated heroes of the internet and technology revolution in my view, remain the hard drive companies.
As the amount of data consumers and businesses want to store and back-up every day continues to explode, it's the hard-drive companies who somehow have to make hard drives a lot more capacious and efficient, while pretty much doing it for the same price as the product it replaces.
A year ago, I talked about perpendicular hard drive technology that promised to provide a 10 x improvement on the day's hard drives. That technology is just rolling out in mainstream products by companies like Seagate.
Now, there's another technology developed and patented by Seagate, that promises a similar improvement a few years hence.
Now most of you aren't geeks, so you're probably not going to care HOW this works, just THAT it works. But in case you want to see how these guys make storage alchemy look easy, take a look at the description of the technology from ComputerWorld storage here...the article is a bit long, but I'm including it here for reader convenience:
"Seagate Technology Inc. plans to increase disk capacity by 10 times with new technology it has just patented, meaning a computer hard drive could soon be storing as much as a terabyte of data.
The Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) technology created by Seagate includes nanotube-based lubrication to allow the read/write head of a disk to get closer to the surface and store more information.
The smaller the data-recording areas on a disk surface, the more of them that can be packed together, and subsequently the greater the capacity of the disk, Seagate said. But reading and writing ever-smaller bits means that the read/write head has to come closer to the disk surface, requiring a tough lubricant layer on the surface.
Storing data properly in extremely small areas requires the magnetic material to be heated during the writing phase, but this causes the lubricant film deposited on top of the magnetized recording layer to evaporate.
Seagate's patent resolves this problem by having a reservoir inside the disk casing that contains nanotube-based lubricant. Some of this is periodically pumped out as a vapor and deposited on the surface of the disk, replenishing the evaporated lubricant. The vapor deposition process is similar to that used in the production of CDs and DVDs.
Seagate anticipates that the new technology could increase disk capacity by a factor of 10, making possible a 600GB 1.8-in. drive, a 1.46TB 2.5-in. drive, and 7.5TB Barracuda 3.5-in. drive. The lubricant reservoirs will be built to last the life of the disk.
Seagate has not given a date by which the technology will appear in products."
They do make it look easy, don't they? They've even included some of this new-fangled, nanotechnology stuff in there.
Why should we care?
Well, as the title of the article, and this post explains, it'll make possible to have a terabyte worth of storage on your laptop in the not too distant future. That's what some small businesses use for back-up drives these days. And as this Wikipedia entry explains, the Library of Congress has about 20 terabytes of text in it's books and manuscripts.
Now, if we can only get the content industry (music, video, publishing, etc.), to give us a 10x improvement in the cost of content, we'd be all set.
Otherwise, we'll need a heck of a lot more "user-generated content" to fill up these drives.
DISCLOSURE: I own shares in Seagate.
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