Chris Mellor at The Register reviews the prospects for the 4TB disk generation and reports that manufacturers are finding the transition to the technologies it needs more difficult and expensive than expected.
This reinforces the argument of my earlier post, based on Dave Anderson's presentation (PDF) to the 2009 Library of Congress Storage workshop, that the exponential drop in cost per byte we expect from disks is about to flatten out.
2 comments:
There is also bad news about flash memory too. Henry Newman and Jeffrey Layton explain the reasons why, even if semiconductor processes stay on their road-map of improvement, this will not produce corresponding improvements in flash memory capacity per chip.
Of course, it may be that these difficulties simply provide the opportunity for alternative technologies such as Memristors and Phase Change Memory to capture the solid state memory market. And if, as with FAWN, reducing the power and cooling costs of storage and query processing is what is driving adoption of solid state memory, the capacity per chip may not be critical.
Mea culpa. I just noticed that the Henry Newman link in the comment above is wrong. It should point here.
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