According to this story at Enterprise Systems, the end is coming to substantial storage growth. For the first time in recent memory, all of the leading manufacturers in the highly competitive field of magnetic disk drives agree on something. Unfortunately, it isn t good news. With current technology and materials, we will soon witness the end of 120 percent per year improvements in disk drive areal density.
Areal density refers to the number of bits that can be stored on a square inch of disk media.
With current disk density growth rates, that will happen within the next three to five years. Apparently, those are 10 years away, meaning we'll have to deal with half a decade slumped storage growth. Despite the huge hard drives we'll see in the years to come, I don't see our thirst for data storage drying up anytime soon. Five years is a long, long time in this business. All rights reserved.