Hard Drive Storage Gets Super Cheap in 2020

Posted on 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.

The study was published by Carnegie Mellon University Professor Mark Kryder and PhD student Chang Soo Kim in IEEE Transactions on Magnetics. The current cost per GB for flash memories is nearly 10 times that of HDDs. The researchers say flash memory technology will reach technical limits before 2020 that will prevent its continued scaling. This will keep it from replacing HDDs according to the study.

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.

The research paper can be found here on ieee.org.


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