A Look Into The Hard Drive's Future

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Conclusion

This overview on manufacturers, hard drive technology and future capacities hopefully allowed you to gain a better understanding of the hard drive market, which may be less spectacular than processors or graphics, but still undergoes more changes than most folks realize. Even if hard drives typically look alike, they are high technology products that are nowhere near vanishing in favor of flash memory or other technologies.

Flash is attacking the hard drive market from the very high end with SLC flash SSDs and from the low-end, where 8 GB to 32 GB MLC flash devices are cheaper and more efficient than 1” or similar hard drives (although such flash-based products typically don’t perform very well). However, flash will not be able to meet the demand, capacity requirements or cost pressures of the majority of the storage market any time soon.

Hard drive makers are preparing to switch to patterned recording media once perpendicular magnetic recording hits its limits. Combined with thermally-assisted recording, Hitachi GST and other manufacturers still see the potential of creating hard drives with up to 50 TB capacity within the first half of the next decade. We can expect perpendicular recording to result in much higher capacities than we’re seeing today, though, even without additional technologies.