Hard drive technology & future developments

52 years ago the hard drive, hard disk, fixed disk or HDD as named by many, landed on planet earth.

Little did the creators of this device realise how it would have impacted into day to day life and how the storage capacity would have grown.

IBM 305 RAMAC was the planets first commercially available storage system which was on a whole new level of storage.

Total storage capacity was 4.8MB which is so tiny it does not register on the minds on IT users today who are used to buying a mainstream PC with 500GB routinely installed with 1Tb hard drives available the growth has been truly of stellar proportions.

It seems strange that although the hard drive is over 50 years old and has expanded and increased in operational read and write performance that underlying principle remains, that is spinning magnetic platters, for sure they spin much faster, have very trick head arrangements and operate on repeatable sub micron distances the derive is basically an electro mechanical device yes a mechanical device in a digital solid state world, surely that will not last?

Well many manufacturers are committed to this spinning mechanical layout of HDD media for the near future at least with talk of 20k spindle speeds to increase access times, however there is change happening.

SSD or solid state devices are now emerging on laptop systems with 16 and 32 GB of storage.
SSD technology has some distinct obvious advantages such as no moving parts, ideal for users on the move and more resilient to G forces and general movement, less prone to thermal changes, higher performance for read and write times and almost instant loading of operating systems, the downside at the moment as with all new emerging technology is the cost for R & D and production costs which will eventually fall as the technology becomes more mainstream.

Further developments are hybrid drives which are a combination of classic magnetic storage media and the SSD devices.

Magneto resistive random access memory or MRAM for short has been around for some time now and has shown promising results with lab tests, a non volatile storage device and utilising magnetic properties rather than traditional electrical charges this system offers very good power efficiency so ideal in the greener world and mobile users.

Heat assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) has also reached the press with favourable reviews and is based on thermal changes to the media surface, the density has been calculated at 50 GB per inch.