Hard Drive Storage Gets Super Cheap in 2020 October 25, 2009
Physorg.com has an interesting article about what technology will follow hard drives. The article cites a study that has hard drive storage costing as little as $40 for a 14 TB drive in 2020.
According to a new study, 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 (today, a typical 500 GB hard drive costs about $100). Although flash memories have also become popular - with advantages such as lower power consumption, faster read access time, and better mechanical reliability than HDDs - the cost per GB for flash memories is nearly 10 times that of HDDs. In addition, flash memory technology will reach technical limits that will prevent its continued scaling before 2020, keeping them from replacing HDDs.
The article describes a couple potential replacement technologies - random access memory (PCRAM) and spin transfer torque random access memory (STTRAM) - but nothing that is cheaper than the hard drive before 2020. However, sometimes technologies emerge that surprise you.
