Petabyte Disk Drives in Seven Years

[Derek Atkins]

A friend of mine posited the posibility of housing two 2.5" laptop
drives in a standard 3.5" EIDE enclosure to create a hardware RAID1
array.  Imagine a non-failing 3.5" disk!  :)

-derek

Randall Hofland <rhofland at localnet.com> writes:

> 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’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’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’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’t keep up.*
>>
>>
>
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-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
       warlord at MIT.EDU                        PGP key available