IHS Predicts HDD Capacity Will Double By 2016
SSDs may be the fast and cool storage devices to own, but hard disc drives are not becoming obsolete anytime soon, due to their shear amount of storage capacity which SSDs can’t touch. Technology research company IHS predicts that HDD capacity will approximately double by 2016, bringing us 8-10TB drives, up from today’s top end 4TB drives. This is due to the continued increases in areal platter density which is currently at around 750Gb per square inch, to around 1700Gb per square inch by 2016 using the current Perpendicular Magnetic Recording (PMR) technology. This will be great news for applications where lots of storage is vital, such as scientific uses, cloud services and thousands of episodes of the latest vacuous pop talent show in super-high 4K definition, among other important applications.
However, PMR is starting to approach its limits, which is slowing this growth rate, otherwise much larger drives would have been predicted by 2016. Enter new kid on the block, Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) technology. This is currently in prototype form, with the main disadvantage holding it back being that the HDD manufacturers haven’t yet found a way to implement it cheaply enough in a mass market product. However, when this problem is cracked, then 30 to 60TB drives would be within easy reach, which represents capacities 10 to 20 times of what they are today.
“The rise in areal density will pave the way for continued growth of the HDD industry,” said Fang Zhang, analyst for storage systems at IHS. “Densities will double during the next five years, despite technical difficulties associated with the perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) technology now used to create higher-areal-density hard disks. In particular, growth opportunities will lie in applications associated with mass enterprise storage requirements, gaming, and in digital video recorders (DVRs) where massive capacity is required to store high-definition video.”
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