Sunday, March 23, 2014

Storage: more capacity calculations

Following on from the previous post on Efficiency and Capacity, baselining "A pile of Disks" as "100% efficient".

Some additional considerations:

Thursday, March 20, 2014

Storage: Efficiency measures

In 2020 we can expect bigger disk drives and hence Petabyte stores. Price per bit will come at a premium, it won't track capacity as it does now: larger capacity drives will cost more per unit.

What are the theoretical limits on which Storage solution "efficiency" can be judged?

We're slowly approaching what could be the last factor-10 improvement, to 10Tbits/in², in rotational 2-D magnetic recording technologies of Hard Disk Drives. Jim Gray (~2000) and Mark Kryder (2009) suggested 7TB/platter for 2.5" disk drives by 2020, assuming a 40%/yr capacity growth.

Rosenthal et al (2012) suggest that, like CPU-speed "Moore's Law", disk capacity growth rates have slowed, suggesting 100Tbits/in² may be possible in the far future. They predict 1.8 Tbits/in² commercially available in 2020, vs 0-6-0.7Tb/in² currently.