What the future holds for data storage
With the right data storage solution, your business can greatly reduce the chance of data loss in the event of a catastrophic situation.
In 2013, IBM estimated 2.5 quintillion bytes of data were created every day worldwide. Since then, the number of people connected to the internet has grown. By over 83%, according to Micro Focus. And there are now more than 4.4 billion internet users around the globe.
Various trends are driving this growth the internet is becoming available in places. That had previously not been able to connect. The proliferation of smart devices, including smartphones. And wearables, the popularity of social media. And the Internet of Things to name just some.
By 2020, there will be 1.7MB of data created every second for every person on earth. According to research from Domo. This is mind-boggling if you also take into account the rate of global population growth.
These are impressive statistics. But this proliferation of data creates problems. Most notably where and how to store it.
Thankfully, there are teams around the world working to solve this problem both in data storage companies. And at research institutions such as universities.
Here we outline some of these upcoming technologies that are starting to make their way onto the market now. As well as concepts for the future of data storage.
Packing it in
The longevity of hard disks, and the rapid rise of solid-state drives (SSDs), can attribute to a continual improvement process to minimize the drawbacks of either technology. The first problem is capacity. Most storage devices need to adhere to a standard form factor. Either 3.5in or 2.5in, to fit in standard desktop or laptop PC cases. This limits the physical area of hard disk platters or flash memory chips you can fit, and thus the
The solution to this packaging problem is to increase data density by stuffing more bytes into the same surface area and manufacturers have proved remarkably adept at inventing new ways to do this.
For example, the hard disk game changed dramatically in 2005 with the perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR), where, broadly speaking, magnetized bits stand perpendicular to the head of the hard disk platter instead of lying down, making room for more bits, as this video from Hitachi demonstrates.
However, after years of data density improvements using PMR (densities doubled between 2009 and 2015), researchers are once again hitting the physical limits: each magnetic ‘bit’ is becoming too small to reliably hold its data, increasing the potential for corruption. New ways to squeeze extra capacity from a hard disk’s platters, as well as a way to increase the number of platters that will fit in a hard disk’s case, are therefore needed to keep hard disks the standard for cost-effective storage of huge quantities of data.
shingled magnetic recording (SMR), introduced by Seagate in 2014, is one way to fit more data on a disk’s platter. In a normal PMR hard disk, data write in parallel tracks that don’t overlap. In an SMR disk, when the write head writes a data track, the new track will overlap part of the previously written track, reducing its width and meaning more tracks can fit on a platter. The thinner track can still be read, as read heads can physically thinner than write heads.
To give a recent example of this technology in action, Western Digital launched a 15TB SMR hard drive in 2018 targeting data centers. The company claimed this could increase the capacity per rack by up to 60TB an enticing prospect for organizations wishing to store large amounts of data.
SMR isn’t without its downsides, though. The fatter write head overwrites neighboring tracks and destroys their data, so these tracks also have to be rewritten. This can slow down the writing process, but this can be managed carefully in the drive’s firmware and isn’t such a problem if the drives are chiefly designed to be used in data centers.
The next big thing, and less of a compromise than SMR, is two-dimensional magnetic recording (TDMR). This is another Seagate technology. And aims to solve the problem of reading data from tightly packing hard disk tracks. Where the read head picks up interference from tracks around the one being read. TDMR disks use multiple read heads to pick up data from several tracks at a time, then work out which data needs, turning the noise into useful data that can analyze and then discard when not required.
Western Digital and Seagate both brought 14TB TDMR drives to market in 2018, with Toshiba demoing a 16TB version at CES 2019, although it hadn’t yet entered mass production.
The multiple read heads of TDMR disks can improve read speeds, but to improve write speeds while increasing data density you need to move away from SMR to the latest hard disk technology: heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR). This aims to overcome the compromise of SMR by changing the material of the hard disk platter, to one where each bit will maintain its magnetic data integrity at a smaller size. The problem is that to write to materials with the needing stability, or coercivity, a stronger magnetic field is required than can currently be produced from a write head.
As HAMR’s name implies. The solution is to use a laser to heat part of the hard disk platter before the data that written down. This lowers the material’s coercivity enough for the data. Write before the heated section cools. And the coercivity rises to make the data secure. HAMR has the potential to increase hard disk density tenfold but. As you would expect, the technology is incredibly hard to make work. Both Western Digital and Seagate have demonstrated working HAMR drives. And Seagate shipped a handful of demo units to select customers in December 2018. The company promised commercial availability in late 2019. Although similar predictions have been made in previous years.
The ascent of NAND and Storage
There’s plenty of innovation in hard disk technology. But it tends to revolve around fitting more data in the same-sized box. Which will most likely end up in a server rack somewhere. If you want your storage to come in different shapes and sizes. To fit in anything from a desktop PC to an ultra-light laptop, you need to look at flash.
