September 24th, 2007
Can we build the unfillable disk drive?
The disk guys are going to try.
This year’s Diskcon proves the storage device industry’s ambitions are as lofty as ever. The engineers are working on really large disk drives. Would a 10 TB - 10 million megabytes - 2.5″ notebook drive hold you?
Don’t look for it any time soon. But the engineers are confident that when the time comes they will be able to build it. Stay tuned to Storage Bits for more on the disk technology road map.
Content + home bandwidth = storage demand
But who is going to need all that capacity? No one. But make it cheap enough, and give people enough HD video and bandwidth to the home and the desire will follow. That’s the theory, anyway.
How will you ever fill it up?
No one wants to build products people won’t buy. Thus a large part of the DiskCon presentations concerned disk applications.
Video is the new photo
Music is good - 700 MB an hour - uncompressed. Photos will be good once the basic consumer point and shoot is producing 25 MB files. But video is the promised land.
1 hour of compressed HD video = 10 GB
Soccer moms will give ESPN competition. Why should big-time sports have all the instant replays, highlight reels and scouting videos? Jennifer’s highlight reel for the 2011 season will be treasured for years.
Get ready for a generation of kids who grow up watching themselves on the big screen.
Once HD camcorders are $500 that’s what most people will buy. Hollywood is working on 4k x 4k resolution as we speak, which Moore’s Law will make surprisingly affordable, surprisingly fast.
And the disk industry will breathe a sigh of relief.
The Storage Bits take
My first computer used - don’t laugh - an audio cassette recorder for mass storage because I couldn’t afford an $800 144 KB floppy drive (I still can’t).
My first hard drive was 30 MB, and I couldn’t believe I’d ever fill it up.
Now I’m sitting next to 1 TB of disk storage, completely confident that not only will I fill it up, but I will shortly need more. Good thing I have 2 empty drive bays.
I do think that certain form factors in some applications, like ultra-light notebooks for road-warriors, will reach an equilibrium. But for consumers . . . . Well, why do they call us consumers?
Comments welcome, or course. If you don’t think video will be the killer app for storage, what, if anything, will be?
Robin Harris has been messing with computers for over 30 years and selling and marketing data storage for over 20 in companies large and small. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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