Comments on: The unsung hard drive

CNET News.com's Michael Kanellos says it may not grab headlines, but there are changes aplenty in this often overlooked part of the technology business.

[grey_eminence]

What's Next ? 3D Atomic Holographic Nanotechnology

http://p2pnet.net/story/842

http://p2pnet.net/story/1211

http://p2pnet.net/story/1385

Storage of tommorrow to make today's technology
the buggy whip of the past according to the press articles.

Who needs hard drives? You're KIDDING???

<< Will the outlook improve? Probably not greatly. Stuart Parkin,
an IBM research fellow, recently extrapolated that the entire
output of the drive industry in the near future will be capable of
storing all the data ever produced. That's why IBM sold off its
drive business to Hitachi, he explained.>>

(1) iPods can't be made fast enough because the hard drives
needed are in short supply.

(2) ALL Hollywood (and Hollywood wannabe) moviemaking now
requires hard drives. And more movies are being made than ever
before. Don't get me started on what happens when iMax movies
go completely digital. And when your local cineplex's projector
goes digital - as it inevitably will, movies will be delivered and
stored on hard drives. With backups.

(3) Broadband is increasing. That means bigger and bigger files
will be sent, AND more people will get them. Filmmakers now
give away trailers for download. That sort of thing will only
grow. Music is cheaper to sell online - and as broadband
increases, the movie industry will discover the same thing,
piracy or not.

(4) ALL cameras will soon be digital. (In fact I think Kodak
recently stopped making consumer-level film.) Research shows
that people take FAR MORE pictures digitally than they ever took
using film cameras. Where will the images be stored? Or do you
think we should just delete Grandma?

(5) I just bought a Terrabyte drive. I had to wait months for it,
because the manufacturer was so heavily backordered. Who
needs THAT much space? Obviously, someone besides me.

(6) New desktop-editing tools like Final Cut Pro and the faster
machines that drive them demand HUGE drives for editing. So
for every copy of a program like Final Cut, ring up at least one
new drive JUST for that work.

(7) HDTV? Changes the whole equation re hard drive space
needed for storage.

(8) DVRs being thrown into the deal when you order satellite or
cable? Ditto. And hey, when I do the replay/pause thing with my
cable remote, that means the cable company has a hard drive
whirring away somewhere.

(9) You say NFL officials take too long when reviewing flags?
Hard drives offer instant rewind. They're already being used by
NHL coaches to evaluate team play on the fly. Some of that
(maybe most of it) gets stored for evaluation LATER, too. Watch
that trend spread to other teams and other sports. Stack of
video tapes with missing labels, or a hard drive with a search
engine - which would YOU want to use when you're a coach
evaluating EACH YEAR'S college draft?

(10) How fast IS the 'net growing? It all goes on hard drives, of
course - and the faster they are, the better.

(11) Cheap DNA testing for criminal investigations? Digital
genetic evaluations to see if I might get a rare disorder (or my
children might inherit one)? Great! Where you going to keep that
data, on paper?

(12) Online music sales are expected to double next year. That
means you need a drive for an iPod AND one attached to your
computer, so the tunes can be shuttled back and forth. No one
outside of Karl Lagerfeld (don't ask) keeps their music ONLY on
their iPods.

(13) Email is now routinely used to prosecute white collar
criminals. For that reason, most states have laws mandating that
corporations keep employee email. And they don't want it
printed and bound, either... guess what THAT means...

(13) Oh and one last thing. All the data that's being stored on
drives now? That data needs to reside on at least two
INDIVIDUAL drives. Or weren't you going to back up your life's
work?

Those are ONLY the high points. Hard drive manufacturing may
be a demanding business, but you made it sound as if these
things were piling up in a warehouse somewhere. Forget the "all
the data ever produced" garbage. More data is produced each
year than in the five years or ten years or fifty years that
preceded it because the means for producing said data is
ubiquitous. Space is cheaper, but the demand is insatiable. Are
hard drives a commodity? Sometimes. But aluminum is a
commodity, too, and people have made fortunes making it.

IBM quit the business because making drives is not what they do
best, NOT because no one wants hard drives anymore. They
want to focus on creating and refining new processes. They'll
pioneer a method for packing more data on a disk and sell the
technology, not oversee an assembly line.

So, there used to be 75 hard drive manufacturers and now there
are ten? You SHOULD have asked how many drives those 75
manufacturers USED to make and how many the 10 make today.
You should have asked how big the hard drive pie was then and
how big it is now?

(mmmm hard drive pie,,,,, gargle...)

So you write about TECHNOLOGY? Really?

[jwarren.carroll]

Just do the Math...

I think you missed out on what the guy was saying. Your thinking is a little to flat. He wasn't making a comment that nobody is going to need hard drives, but just that the amount of data produced over the next two decades will not keep pace with storage density.

Anyway let me illustrate this plainly. Moore's Law simply put means that processor speed will double, and data density will double approximately every 17 months or so. It is also widely held that this will hold for at least the next two decades or so.

What does this mean...

(20 years) * (24 months/year) / (17 months/cycle)

This gives us roughly 14 cycles of Moore's Law. Think about this in terms of your 1 terabyte drive.

(1 terabyte)*(2^14) = 16384 terabytes of information, or 16,384,000 gigabytes.

That's:
3,485,957 Single layer DVD's
1,927,529 Double layer DVD's
655,360 Single layer Blu-Ray (HD-DVD's)
327,680 Double layer Blu-Ray (HD-DVD's)

Roughly speaking if you were to fill up that drive with high-definition movies, you would have about 150 years worth of non-stop viewing pleasure.

Anyway, I think I've made my point.