The mechanical harddrive market is weighing its options at the moment as it is being replace by other solutions in more and more niches of the market. The Solid State technology have caught up and surpassed it in many ways. We have reached a point where the mechanical harddrive technology have no other advantage that its supreme price advantage, in terms of gigabyte/price. A new study concludes that this will scenario will remain over the coming ten years.
Professor Mark Kryder and PhD student Chang Soo Kim at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh have presented an article where they survey 13 technologies for NonVolatile Memory (NVM). The articles discussed which, if any, of these technologies that could become a threat to the HDD technology in terms of price/storage capacity in 2020.
The only two technologies that pose a threat to HDD technology in terms of capacity is the very hot Phase Change Memory and the lesser known STTRAM (Spin Transfer Torque Random Access Memory).
Kryder and Kim found that STTRAMs appear to potentially offer superior power efficiency, among other advantages. If STTRAMs could be improved to store multiple bits per cell, the researchers predict that STTRAMs’ density could make them candidates for replacing flash memory and possibly HDDs.
But it still looks like the HDD technology will keep its terabyte/price advantage up until 2020, as most NVM technologies are damed to run into problems with development of performance and storage capacity.
Western Digital was first to launch 2TB harddrive
A two-platter 2.5″ harddrive of 2020 is expected to store more than 14TB if the development keeps scaling. Current 2.5″ harddrives need three platters to achieve 1TB. Mark Kryder, former CTO for Seagate Technology, said after the study that STTRAM is a technology companies should invest in. Especially for designing Multi-Level Cell circuits for better storage capacity.
Original article: Mark H. Kryder, Chang Soo Kim. After Hard Drives – What Comes Next? IEEE Transactions on Magnetics, October issue 2009. Vol. 45, No. 10.
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