David Szabados over at Seagate writes that data storage densities could reach amazing levels in the near future:
The need for continued storage is clear, and the pathway to advancing the technology also continues to look strong ahead. While HAMR and BPM continue development for eventual release a few years away, further down the road, we expect that combining of both methods will be occur. It is here where technologists have estimated we may ultimately reach densities of 50 Tb/in2 or greater. To put that number in perspective, 50 Tb/in2 would provide enough storage to hold the entire contents of the U.S. Library of Congress on a single disk the size of a 30mm diameter coin. Think we may not ever need that much storage? Time will certainly tell, but when we think to how far we’ve advanced with our storage needs over the past 10 years (nevermind the entire 50+ year history of HDDs), it wouldn’t surprise this blogger if we found ways to use this capacity in our storage future.
Oh great, so if you think having to fsck a filesystem now takes a long time just wait for these to arrive! 🙂
No doubt that we’ll see various improvements scale in other areas including file management, disk rebuild times, etc.