The Future of Storage Devices

   Until now, people have managed to make a storage devices that have up to 50 petabytes of storage. Doesn't look that many to you? Let me express it in a numerical form .50000000000000000 bytes of data. That's a lot of data if you ask me.

  All of you who are reading this are probably thinking, what does the future hold for the development of storage devices? Smaller size? Maybe bigger capacity?

With the human race creating and saving an exponential amount of data, this is a great thing and the future of data storage is pretty exciting. Here are a few of the emerging storage technologies that may be signs of what’s on the horizon.

1. Helium Drives

Helium-filled hard drives have lately been pushing the capacity boundaries of hard drives, which are typically filled with air. Last September, Western Digital announced the world’s first 10TB hard drive, just a few weeks after Seagate announced its 8TB air-filled hard drive (the largest hard drive at the time). By using helium instead of air, helium-filled drives use less power to spin the disks (which spin more easily thanks to less resistance compared to air), they run cooler, and they can pack in more disks.

The technology is still expensive. Still, these high performance drives will likely only get cheaper and even more expansive–perhaps affordable enough even for consumer use.

2.Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR)

SMR is a new hard drive recording technology. As with helium-filled drives, SMR technology allows for higher capacity on hard drives than traditional storage methods. As Seagate explains it:

SMR achieves higher areal densities by squeezing tracks closer together. Tracks overlap one another, like shingles on a roof, allowing more data to be written to the same space. As new data is written, the drive tracks are trimmed, or shingled. Because the reader element on the drive head is smaller than the writer, all data can still be read off the trimmed track without compromise to data integrity or reliability. In addition, traditional reader and writer elements can be used for SMR. This does not require significant new production capital to be used in a product, and will enable SMR-enabled HDDs to help keep costs low.

In 2014, Seagate introduced the first SMR hard drive, which improved hard drive density by 25%. At $260 for 8TB (three cents per GB), it’s a cost-effective drive for backups and archiving–though not necessarily performance , since the drive only has a 5,900 rpm spindle speed. 

Will all of the current storage devices be irrelevant in the future?

3.DNA

Perhaps the strangest new storage technology of the future is DNA. Yes, the molecule that stores biological information could be used to store other kinds of data. Harvard researchers in 2012 were able to encode DNA with digital information, including a 53,400-word book in HTML, eleven JPEG images, and one JavaScript program. DNA offers incredible storage density, 2.2 petabytes per gram, which means that a DNA hard drive about the size of a teaspoon could fit all of the world’s data on it–every song ever composed, book ever written, video ever shared. Besides the space savings, DNA is ideal for long-term storage: While you’re lucky if your hard drive lasts four years and optical disks are susceptible to heat and humidity, lead Harvard researcher George Church says “You can drop DNA wherever you want, in the desert or your backyard, and it will be there 400,000 years later.”

Bye-bye Blu-ray, and hello DNA movies. 

DNA takes a long time to read and write to and, as you might imagine, the technology is still too expensive to be usable now. According to New Scientist, in one recent study the cost to encode 83 kilobytes was £1000 (about $1,500 US dollars). Still, scientists are encoding information into artificial DNA and adding it to bacteria. It’s like a sci-fi novel that’s currently being written and lived. DNA could be the ultimate eternal drive one day.

4. Other Futuristic Storage Technologies

Not all innovative storage technologies end up becoming mainstream or widely used beyond just research, of course.

Scientists and tech companies have been working on holographic data storage for at least a decade. In 2011, GE demonstrated its holographic discs storage: DVD-sized disks that could store 500GB thanks to cramming the data onto layers of tiny holograms (unlike Blu-Ray discs, which store data just on the surface). These discs also had a relatively long lifespan prediction of 30 or more years. Not much has been said about the Holographic Virtual Disc (HVD) lately, though, and one of the biggest developers of the holographic drives, InPhase Technologies, went bankrupt in 2010. That’s not to say the technology won’t be a prominent storage technology in the future (what says “future” more than “holographic” anyway?).

Well, maybe quantum storage. Scientists are currently investigating ways to store data using quantum physics-e.g., a bit of data attached to the spin of an electron. Right now this technology can only store tiny amounts of data for a very short amount of time (not even a day yet), but if it works and takes off, we could see instant data syncing between two points anywhere, thanks to quantum entanglement.

The Current Technologies of Computer Storage

Since the first computer was made, all of its components including storage devices have evolved greatly. Lets talk about it, shall we?

There are three main categories of storage devices: optical, magnetic and semiconductor.

1.Magnetic Storage

     The earliest of these was the magnetic device. Computer systems began with magnetic storage in the form of tapes (yes, just like a cassette or video tape). These graduated to the hard disk drive and then to a floppy disk. All magnetic media use the same general process of a read/write head magnetizing material. On a hard drive, the materials are magnetized on a glass or aluminum disk. Early storage was small. It would take many tapes to back up a mainframe system - a large system with few programs and many users - and many floppies were needed to back up significant work on a personal computer because of the low storage capacity. In the stone age of personal computers, all programs, and the work accomplished using them, were stored on 5 1/4-inch floppy disks. The storage capacity of that floppy was typically only for text and was 360 kilobytes (KB).


    Magnetic media transitions were made to larger capacity portable disks such as the ZIP drive. These started with 100 MB sizes and moved to 250 and 500 MB. Part of the trouble with the ZIP drive was the speed with which they developed - it was so fast that the manufacturer neglected to keep backward compatibility going. In other words, the drive hardware for the 250-MB ZIP wouldn't work for the 100 MB disk, and the 250 disk couldn't be used in the 100. We've moved light years beyond that to improved internally-mounted hard drives, which can hold at least a terabyte of information. Think of a terabyte as enough different music to listen to while working a full-time job for an entire year! And these same hard drives have become portable and lightweight enough to carry around with us, giving us the ability to bring software and data files everywhere we go. The original magnetic media became cumbersome. Not all machines had ZIP drives installed, and frequently, a document or database large in size took up several floppies.

2.Optical Storage

   About that time, optical devices were starting to be marketed. An optical storage device is written and read with a laser. It is strong and can handle temperature fluctuations much better than magnetic media. Because the floppy was so inexpensive at this time, it took several years before the optical drives became affordable to the general and small business consumer.

   The disks used for storage (like CDs, DVDs and Blu-rays) were more expensive than floppies but held a lot of data. A compact disc (CD) can hold 700 MB of data, or roughly a little over an hour of music. It actually took until CD players became common in homes and cars for the playing of music for CDs to come down in price enough for more use by consumers. Digital video discs (DVDs) began being issued for consumer-released movies. A single-sided DVD holds 4.7 gigabytes (GB) of data, so a normal, not overly-computerized two-hour movie will fit.

3.Semiconductor

   Semiconductor memory is an electronic data storage device, often used as computer memory, implemented on a semiconductor-based integrated circuit. There are many different types of implementations using various technologies.

   Most types of semiconductor memory have the property of random access which means that it takes the same amount of time to access any memory location, so data can be efficiently accessed in any random order. This contrasts with data storage media such as hard disks and CDs which read and write data consecutively and therefore the data can only be accessed in the same sequence it was written.

   Semiconductor memory also has much faster access times than other types of data storage; a byte of data can be written to or read from semiconductor memory within a few nanoseconds, while access time for rotating storage such as hard disks is in the range of milliseconds. For these reasons it is used for main computer  memory (primary storage), to hold data the computer is currently working on, among other uses.

Although semiconductor storage devices are usually used for RAM, there are also some secondary storage device that utilise the semiconductor technology.For example , NVRAM (Flash memory). It is often used as a semiconductor version of a hard disk, to store files. It is used in portable devices such as PDAs, USB flash drives, and removable memory cards used in digital cameras and cellphones.

4. Cloud Storage

Cloud storage is a model of data storage in which the digital data is stored in logical pools, the physical storage spans multiple servers (and often locations), and the physical environment is typically owned and managed by a hosting company. These cloud storage providers are responsible for keeping the data available and accessible, and the physical environment protected and running. People and organizations buy or lease storage capacity from the providers to store user, organization, or application data.

Thats all for this post.

Introduction to Storage

In this post, we are going to talk about storage . So, what is a storage?

No, not this type of storage.


The storage that we are going to discuss is a computer storage. The word says t all. A storage store things in it. In computer storage, it stores data, either it is big or small. There a two types of storage, which is :

1. Primary Storage

Primary storage typically refers to random access memory (RAM).RAM, commonly called "memory," is considered primary storage, since it stores data that is directly accessible by the computer's CPU.

RAM is a high-speed storage medium that can be accessed with minimal delay. Because the RAM is connected directly to the CPU via the memory bus, the CPU can access data stored in RAM very quickly. For this reason, RAM is used to store data loaded by active programs and the operating system.



2. Secondary Storage

Secondary storage refers to the computer's internal hard drive.Hard drives are considered secondary storage since they are not connected directly to the CPU. Instead, hard drives send and receive data through an I/O bus, which may pass through a cache or other type of memory before getting to the CPU.

Also, hard drives are not as fast a RAM, which means they cannot transfer data as quickly. However, unlike RAM, hard drives retain data when the computer is turned off. This is because hard drives store data magnetically, while RAM requires an electrical current.

While the computer's primary internal hard drive is the most common secondary storage device, other devices may be considered secondary storage devices as well. These include additional internal hard drives, external hard drives, and optical drives, which are used for CDs, DVDs, and other optical media.


Here's a link to a video about the introduction to storage, in case you prefer watching video instead of reading.

That's all for now.