Hard drives: State of the industry
The modern world is driven by information, which is expanding every day at an exponential rate, fuelling the demand for greater and greater storage capacity.
As a result the Hard Disk Drive (HDD) industry is growing, driven to deliver larger and faster drives to keep up with the ever increasing needs of both the consumer and business markets.
This demand is being stimulated by an increasingly digital world as more and more people move online and embrace the Web 2.0 concept of user generated content as well as the move towards knowledge sharing worldwide. In the consumer market the sheer variety of devices with which we can store and share information, from emails and photographs to movies and music, has caused an explosion in the generation and distribution of this data.
“It is becoming a common practice to download movies and television series off the Internet, which are large files and need to be kept somewhere, pushing customers to demand larger capacity storage devices. In fact, the average household worldwide now requires an impressive 1TB of storage. While this need may not be as high in South Africa yet the trend towards information sharing is the same and users in the country are catching up rapidly,” says Barber Brinkman, Western Digital Sales Manager for Benelux and South Africa.
In the business world the situation is even more exaggerated as the majority of people are constantly connected, sending hundreds of emails every day and gathering and sharing increasing amounts of information. As the world moves ever more into the digital realm the size of files being shared increases, online marketing becomes the norm and larger websites with more and more data are emerging, all of which needs to be stored somewhere. Cloud computing is another emerging trend that is driving the need for higher storage capacity.
“Whether enhancements to technology leading to greater capacity have driven the explosion of information or whether the need for more information has fuelled technology to deliver higher and higher levels of storage capability is not entirely clear,” says Linsay Narayanan, Western Digital product specialist at distributor Drive Control Corporation.
“One thing however is clear, the need is there. And as consumers demand more storage the result is
that HDD manufacturers are constantly developing drives to cater for this.”
From the humble beginnings of HDDs in the 1980’s which today could not even store a single email or document, technology has progressed rapidly, always pushing the boundaries to deliver greater storage capacity on a single device. An evolution in HDDs has been the development of Advanced Format Technology (AFT), a technique which decreases the space of inter-sector gaps allowing more data to be stored in a device of the same size as previously.
“This technology has enabled the delivery of 2TB drives into the market, a limit which will soon be breached with the release of 3TB drives,” Brinkman adds.
“AFT also allows for lower capacity drives to become faster and more efficient as it can reduce the number of platters on a drive for speedier data retrieval. While 3TB is the current limit we are always working on delivering more capacity so it stands to reason that the logical next step in the HDD market is the delivery of 4TB devices.”
Over the years the HDD industry has evolved several different products to meet the various needs of the market, from 3.5″ drives for desktop machines to 2.5″ mobile drives, enterprise products for the server market and more recently Solid State Drives which do not use the traditional platters and as a result deliver faster speeds and a more rugged construction.
“These devices are mainly appealing to the high end server market on the business end and gamers on the consumer end, as the technology is still fairly expensive to produce. They are mainly used as secondary drives to store things like operating systems or games on because of their speed, but are currently only available in sizes of up to 512Gb so for primary storage their use is limited,” says Narayanan.
“While the technology does exist to push this capacity up to 1TB it is too expensive to produce at the moment and as a result are only used in very specific applications. However demand is growing rapidly.”
SSD offers a number of benefits, namely that they are smaller, quieter and more rugged while running cooler and offering a more energy efficient operation, something which in today’s world of increasing eco-consciousness is becoming more and more important. In light of this green trend HDDs have also evolved to deliver more energy efficient devices that have lower power consumption while still maintaining high levels of performance.
“Technologies such as AFT and intelligent drive heads enable HDDs to find data quicker, using less power to do so. Firmware that enables maintenance of continuous speeds without wasting energy and techniques that allow the device to use less power when in idle mode have also contributed to the improved eco-footprint of hard drives today,” adds Brinkman.
Looking into the future of hard drives, it is safe to assume that capacity will continue to increase as the boundaries of AFT are pushed to their limit. Solid State Drives will also continue to be developed and as the technology becomes cheaper they will have more widespread application across the market. Greener, even more energy efficient devices are also on the cards as consumers demand more eco-conscious technology to support a more sustainable future.
Hard drives: State of the industry << Comments and views
Linsay Narayanan is a Western Digital product specialist at Drive Control Corporation
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