Futuretech: Bigger, better, and faster, hard drives

By Logan Booker, Atomic MPC
Ed Dawson, PC Authority

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The humble hard drive recently celebrated its 50th birthday. Is this device about to go the way of the defunct floppy disk? Ed Dawson investigates which storage technologies will stay with the PC into the distant future.

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Computers are fast these days. Unfortunately, our insatiable hunger for larger files, more fully-featured operating systems, greater capacity and better quality has saturated computer performance almost as quickly as it increases. Anyone who has sat waiting for their computer to respond after launching an application knows what I mean. Mouse cursor frozen, you’re left listening to the hard drive chew away at unknown amounts of distributed data, scattered across your disks and platters in a seemingly endless maelstrom of bits. Intel recently revealed that when launching applications, the major performance roadblock is mechanical latency — a delay resulting from the hard drive’s method of operation. In delays like this, of the “perhaps I’ll go and make a coffee” duration, many of us have pondered the idea that there must be a better way.

The hard drive is admittedly approaching human retirement age. The first hard disk storage device, released in 1956 had a whimsical five megabytes capacity, contained in 50 platters, each 24 inches wide. Today, a pocket-sized drive can store 12 gigabytes of information on a single platter, one inch in size. This is a staggering example of how areal density, the amount of information that will fit onto a square inch of disk space has literally increased around 65 million times since the experimental levels of 1956. And in that soaring quest to increase density, there’s no end in sight. By the year 2020, Seagate Technologies estimates that same one-inch platter will be able to hold around 80 times the data it can today. At the same time, sales of hard drives for the next five years are expected to exceed all the sales of the past 25 years.

Despite this market optimism and discussion around capacity, there’s less talk about increasing the hard drive’s performance. With revolutions per minute (RPM) likely to halt at around 10,000 RPM for consumer applications, researchers questing to improve hard drive performance have had to look elsewhere. Adding more cache memory can help, but there’s a limit to the amount of expensive RAM-like memory that can be added to a drive whilst retaining a consumer price tag.

New advances in drive caching such as Intel’s Readyboost offer the hard drive the shot in the arm it needs. Making use of cheap, high-capacity NAND memory, promises the most dramatic hard drive performance boost in years. But balanced against the raw desire for increased capacity and performance, reliability follows a close third. With the hard drive as the lynchpin of a personal computer system, its resistance to failure is absolutely paramount. We’ve sourced representatives from all the major hard drive manufacturers: Seagate Technologies, Western Digital, Samsung Electronics and Hitachi Global Storage Technologies have all contributed to give us a glimpse into the future of the hard drive. We’ve asked them to level with us: is there a replacement hard drive technology waiting in the wings? What are the near-term hard drive performance boosters? For how long can you trust a consumer hard drive? We’ve answered all of these queries and more.

Despite dragging the anchor on computer system performance, the hard drive is ageing gracefully – in fact it’s looking fitter than ever. Read on.

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