Idea Center

I have been shopping for Hard Drives ever since they came in a 40 MByte pack (which seems like a long time ago.) I recently pepped up my Home compile server with 1 TByte of storage, with 2 500GB HDDs at a non-standard 9600rpm.

Where is storage technology heading?

The first is a rapid increase in choice of "External" storage devices that can be plugged into your PC.

This one is from SanDisk, you could find hundred others.

This too is another SanDisk product for HandyCams. It isn't bigger than 5 sq.cm and it's the size and the density of the storage that makes it attractive.

If you have been missing the technology race in storage, you ought to take a look at this video which is almost a year old. It has a comparison of the Solid State Drive (SSD) versus the Hard Disk Drive (HDD) which we conventionally use for storage.

Magnetic storage has always been able to keep up with the race for increased storage. We have seen them scale from a 20 MByte Hard Drive in the pack (1992 c.e.) to 1,500,000 MByte Hard Drive in a pack (2008 c.e.) - the new 1.5 TByte Hard Drive which (some) consumers can buy.

Multi-layer magnetic storage and retrieval, multi-head, single platter storage to reduce mechanical risk, On-Drive Flash to upgrade Hard Drive firmware are some of the refinements you can find in the market today. Almost all these Hard Drives come with Logical Access modes that are configurable on the on-drive firmware to abstract low-level configuration from the BIOS and the Operating System.

The next big thing was to reduce power consumption and provide lighter systems (yes magnetic storage still stays heavier than the power source on your PC.) So we have completely Solid State Hard Drives offering almost all the storage home users need.

The next leap of course is to put Solid State Storage (SSD) and Magnetic Storage (Mechanical Storage) together in a Hybrid form for improved data read/write access speeds. The Hybrid Storage alliance shows how the user can benefit from the marriage of both forms of technology. If you're wondering when this technology is making it to your laptop, the answer is "now." Operating Systems have started sporting support for it and manufacturers are packaging storage with PCs and Laptops on the shelves.

Here is what the above average consumer would be looking for:

A device that can be connected to a Network or Wireless  network and seamlessly provide a shared storage accessible as a shared drive. DSL Modem -> Wireless Access Point -> Wireless Hard Drive giving us a simple infrastructure to store data at home, while also moving around.

This will not take time and I would bet on a company that tries to completely de-couple storage from the PC without the need for extremely high speed access like Data Center : Network Access Storage [NAS] devices.