Network Computing is part of the Informa Tech Division of Informa PLC

This site is operated by a business or businesses owned by Informa PLC and all copyright resides with them. Informa PLC's registered office is 5 Howick Place, London SW1P 1WG. Registered in England and Wales. Number 8860726.

Current Hard Drives Hitting Limits, Change Forecast

A slowdown in the ability to continually wring more performance out of existing technologies will change the face of the hard drive and the IT industry in general.

That's the word from one of the storage industry's leading technologists who this week discussed storage and data center trends with a roomful of storage administrators and CIOs at Nth Generation's Summer 2006 Technology Symposium, held this week in Anaheim, Calif.

Nth Generation is a San Diego-based solution provider and one of Hewlett-Packard's biggest partners in the Western United States.

Richie Lary, an independent consultant who once helped define Digital Equipment's VAX computer architecture and the storage line that was eventually acquired by Compaq and then HP, looked at expected hard drive development over the next 10 years and said he expects the typical 3.5-inch drive to have a capacity of 3 Tbytes to 7 Tbytes.

To get to that capacity, however, will require some rethinking of hard drive technology because of how complicated hard drive technology has become.

  • 1