Carry more data
Boffins claim that there is life in the HDD technology
yet with the costs falling and drive sizes increasing. A new study
claims that by 2020, hard disk drives will
likely be less expensive on a cost per terabyte basis than any of the
competing technologies. The study gives the thumbs down to boffins who
are
developing nonvolatile memory (NVM) technologies, saying it is
unlikely to replace HDDs within the next decade.
According to the popular engineering magazine IEEE
Transactions on Magnetics, which we get for the spot the ball
competition, Professor Mark Kryder and PhD student Chang Soo Kim of Carnegie
Mellon University have investigated 13 up-and-coming NVM technologies to
see whether one of them might outperform HDDs on a cost-per-TB basis in
2020.
They reasons that if HDDs continue to progress at their
current pace, then in 2020 a two-disk, 2.5-inch disk drive will be
capable of storing more than 14 TB and will cost about $40. The cost of
flash memories are about ten times that figure and it will soon will reach
technical limits that will prevent its continued scaling before 2020,
keeping them from replacing HDDs.
Kryder and Kim said that most technologies will probably
not be competitive with HDDs or flash memories at that time,
except for two potential candidates: phase change random access memory
(PCRAM) and spin transfer torque random access memory (STTRAM).
PCRAM is based on the phase change properties of
chalcogenide glass. With the application of heat, the glass can switch
between two different states (amorphous and crystalline) to be used as a
memory. PCRAMs have the potential to offer high densities and be cost-competitive with HDDs, but their biggest drawback is
that they require somewhat higher power than most other
technologies.
STTRAM, which is similar to magnetic RAM, uses a spin
polarized current to write data by reorienting the states of a magnetic
tunnel junction between parallel and anti-parallel orientations. Kryder and Kim found that STTRAMs appear to potentially
offer superior power efficiency, among other advantages. If STTRAMs
could be improved to store multiple bits per cell, the researchers predict
that STTRAMs’ density could make them candidates for replacing flash
memory and possibly HDDs.
However not for a few years yet.