Petabyte Disk Drives in Seven Years

[Randall Hofland]

One of the benefits of the increase in hard drive capacity is the rapid 
decrease in cost per unit of storage, thus decreasing the reliance on 
slower and sometimes less reliable technologies. High speed hard drive 
arrays are ultimately safer, faster and in the end more space and time 
efficient (and now more cost effective as well). With high speed 
internet connections growing in abundance and competition for internet 
access heating up and lowering costs, the next phase might be for 
dedicated home and business computer users to use large in-home/on-site 
disk arrays to store data much like the Google and other search engines, 
and Akamai web caches, thus lowering overall bandwidth demands and 
improving on-site performance, much like the new AOL browser uses 
caching to speed up its downloads. Even nicer, I'd hope to see a new 
standard created for small high capacity drives that would just hot-plug 
into small desktop array boxes (and USB or Firewire connected), or 
perhaps even into tray-loading modules engineered to fit into the 
ubiqutious 3.5"/5.25" drive bays (I suspect you could create a 
substantial RAID 0+1 or even RAID 5 array using 2.5" drives or smaller), 
with these designed for both caching and general data storage purposes. 
SQUID is an open source program designed to serve just that caching 
function and would dovetail nicely with such hardware.

The future looks bright, at least on that front.


MCPerkins7 at aol.com wrote:

> Petabyte Disk Drives in Seven Years--What Does That Mean for You?
>  
>
>
> Researchers have produced a nanoscale device that can sense magnetic 
> fields more than 100 times weaker than current techniques allow. If 
> applied to hard disks this could increase storage by a factor of up to 
> 1,000, turning today's 200-gigabyte disks into 200-terabyte devices.
> The new system uses an effect called ballistic magnetoresistance, 
> works well at room temperature and would be easy to integrate with 
> current disk drive manufacturing.
> The sensors are made from nanometer-sized nickel whiskers strung 
> between two much larger nickel electrodes. The whiskers are so fine 
> that electrons have to travel in a straight 'ballistic' line across 
> them, as opposed to the normal staggering that goes on in thicker 
> conductors.
> Due to this restriction, even small magnetic fields have a large 
> effect on the ease with which the electrons move. This effect has been 
> known for some time, but now a way has been invented to efficiently 
> and repeatedly produce devices with known parameters.
> The same technique may also be useful in medicine by detecting the 
> unique magnetic signature of biological molecules in solution.
> A disk drive stores bits on its surface as a pattern of magnetic 
> fields. As the bits get smaller, the storage density per square 
> centimeter gets higher, but the strength of each individual magnetic 
> field gets weaker. The ability of existing sensors to reliably read 
> weak fields is one of the major limiting factors in making larger hard 
> disks, although density has been doubling each year since 1997.
> At this rate, the one-petabyte (1-million-gigabyte) disk will arrive 
> shortly before 2010. Comparatively, the world disk drive production in 
> 1995 totaled 20 petabytes.
> * ZDNet <http://news.zdnet.co.uk/story/0,,t269-s2129861,00.html>** 
> February 4, 2003*
>
>
> * Dr. Mercola's Comment*
> * Many of you know that along with health I also have a passion for 
> technology. The fact that a petabyte drive is real and will be here in 
> seven years is absolutely amazing and will transform much of the way 
> computers are used today.*
> * So just how big is a petabyte drive and what could you put on it?*
> * One certainty is that you will not fill the space with personal 
> jottings or reading matter. In round numbers, a book is a megabyte. If 
> you read one book a day for every day of your life for 80 years, your 
> personal library will amount to less than 30 gigabytes. Remember a 
> petabyte is 1 million gigabytes so you will still have 999,970 
> gigabytes left over.*
> * To fill any appreciable fraction of the drive with text you)B’ll need 
> to acquire a major research library. The Library of Congress would be 
> a good candidate; it is said to hold 24 million volumes, which would 
> take up one-fiftieth of your disk. So you could fit 50 Library of 
> Congresses on your petabyte drive.*
> * Other kinds of information are bulkier than text. A picture, for 
> example, is worth much more than a thousand words; for high-resolution 
> images a round-number allocation might be 10 megabytes each.*
> * And this is being generous. Most images from a digital camera are 
> one to four megabytes, not 10. How many such pictures can a person 
> look at in a lifetime? I can only guess, but 100 images a day 
> certainly ought to be enough for a family album. After 80 years, that 
> collection of snapshots would add up to 30 terabytes. So your petabyte 
> disk will have 970,000 gigabytes left after a lifetime of high quality 
> photos.*
> * What about music? MP3 audio files run a megabyte a minute, more or 
> less. At that rate, a lifetime of listening--24 hours a day, 7 days a 
> week for 80 years--would consume 42 terabytes of disk space. So with 
> all your music and pictures for a lifetime you will have 928,000 
> gigabytes free on your disk.*
> * The one kind of content that might possibly overflow a petabyte disk 
> is video. In the format used on DVDs, the data rate is about two 
> gigabytes per hour. Thus the petabyte disk will hold some 500,000 
> hours worth of movies; if you want to watch them all day and all night 
> without a break for popcorn, they will actually fill up your petabyte 
> drive if you have a lifetime of video on it as it will give you 57 
> years of video.*
> * But this would probably be more than enough for most people as who 
> wants to see a picture of you sleeping for one-third of your life. 
> However, a second petabyte derive could record every moment of life, 
> in high-quality video, of the oldest person on earth.*
> * Still another nagging question is how anyone will be able to 
> organize and make sense of a personal archive amounting to 1 million 
> gigabytes. Computer file systems and the human interface to them are 
> already creaking under the strain of managing a few gigabytes; using 
> the same tools to index the Library of Congress is unthinkable.*
> * Perhaps this is the other side of the economic equation: information 
> itself becomes free (or do I mean worthless?), but metadata--the means 
> of organizing information--is priceless.*
> * The notion that we may soon have a surplus of disk capacity is 
> profoundly counterintuitive. A well-known corollary of Parkinson)B’s Law 
> says that data, like everything else, always expands to fill the 
> volume allotted to it. Shortage of storage space has been a constant 
> of human history; I have never met anyone who had a hard time filling 
> up closets or bookshelves or file cabinets.*
> * But closets and bookshelves and file cabinets don)B’t double in size 
> every year. Now it seems we face a curious Malthusian catastrophe of 
> the information economy: the products of human creativity grow only 
> arithmetically, whereas the capacity to store and distribute them 
> increases geometrically. The human imagination can)B’t keep up.*
>
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