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.
Freezing Gives Hackers Temporary Access to DRAM Data February 22, 2008
An article on MSNBC says that encrypted hard drives may become accessible to hackers with the use of a burst of cold air. The article cites a new Princeton University report. Princeton's research found that freezing a DRAM chip will give a hacker temporary access to computer memory.
Freezing a dynamic random access memory, or DRAM, chip, the most common type of memory chip in personal computers, causes it to retain data for minutes or even hours after the machine loses power, the report found. That data includes the keys to unlock encryption. Without freezing, the chip loses its contents within seconds.
Hackers can steal information stored in memory by rebooting the compromised machine with a simple program designed to copy the memory contents - before the computer has a chance to purge sensitive data, according to the study.
Laptops left in hibernation or sleep mode, or simply not turned off at all, are the most vulnerable to the new type of attack.
"These risks imply that disk encryption on laptops may do less good than widely believed," according to the report, which was published this week by researchers from Princeton, the Electronic Frontier Foundation digital rights group, and Wind River Systems software company. "Ultimately, it might become necessary to treat DRAM as untrusted, and to avoid storing sensitive confidential data there, but this will not be feasible until architectures are changed to give software a safe place to keep its keys."
The researchers were able to freeze the memory chips with by spraying an "upside-down canister of multipurpose duster spray" directly onto them and then using memory-imaging tools to read the data on the chips.
You can read more about the research project here and you can see a YouTube video below.
Seagate Drives Boost Storage Capacity January 17, 2006
The Associated Press reports that Seagate has come out with a new drive that uses perpendicular recording to jump the notebook's hard drive up to 160 gigabytes from 120 gigabytes. The drive stores data vertically instead of horizontally like previous drive.
Seagate's new drive, the Momentus 5400.3, was being shipped as of Monday, the Scotts Valley, Calif.-based company said. The shift to perpendicular recording allows it to bump up the maximum capacity of its notebook drive to 160 gigabytes from 120 gigabytes.
The 2.5-inch drive costs $325, compared to about $240 for the 120 gig model. Seagate plans to extend the new recording technology to other notebook drives, as well its 1-inch drives used in handheld gadgets and 3.5-inch drives for desktop PCs.
"Our transition to perpendicular technology increases our ability to meet the needs of our growing customer base," said Karl Chicca, general manager of Seagate's Personal Storage unit.
Other drive makers also have either announced products or plans that include perpendicular recording. At the Consumer Electronics Show earlier this month, Toshiba unveiled its second 1.8-inch drive that relies on the new technology.
The article says drives like these could increase capacity by as much five times drives that store data horizontally. Seagate's hard drive was announced at CES along with scads of other gadgets.
