When will the first petabyte hard drive be sold?

tdream

tdream

tdream

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We moved from Gigabyte to Terabytes rather quickly as I recall. Or maybe it's my memory fading. How long will it take until we see the first petabyte drives on the market? Petabyte is 1000 Terabytes btw :)
 
233 said:
Err petabyte is 1024 terrabytes

Banishment for the op for his noobness
Click to expand...

Curses Foiled!

:unless:

Multiples of bytes
Decimal
Value Metric
1000 kB kilobyte
10002 MB megabyte
10003 GB gigabyte
10004 TB terabyte
10005 PB petabyte
10006 EB exabyte
10007 ZB zettabyte
10008 YB yottabyte
Binary
Value JEDEC IEC
1024 KB kilobyte KiB kibibyte
10242 MB megabyte MiB mebibyte
10243 GB gigabyte GiB gibibyte
10244 - - TiB tebibyte
10245 - - PiB pebibyte
10246 - - EiB exbibyte
10247 - - ZiB zebibyte
10248 - - YiB yobibyte
Orders of magnitude of data
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petabyte

:D
 
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I also saw that Episode :p

I thought they changed it?

Kilobyte = 1000 bytes
Kibibyte = 1024 bytes

So Petabyte = 1000 Terrabytes
But Pebibyte = 1024 Tebibytes

or am I subject to an early april fools :p
 
Hard drives tend to use base 10 rather than base 2 definitions (i.e. multiples of 1000 rather than 1024) for unit prefixes as far as I remember.

Also, iunno. If we use something like Moore's law then we assume that hard drive capacities roughly double every two years. Say we're at about 4TB now. Use the geometric series formula Un = ar^n where a = 4, r=2 (representing doubling) and we'll say n/2 to represent every other year.

1000 = 4*2^(n/2)
250 = 2^(n/2)
log_2(250) = n/2
2*log_2(250) = n
n ~= 16

So like 2030 or something.
 
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I'm pretty sure I had a 3gb hard drive in 1997/8 and that being massive at the time, so it has been at least 15 years from GB to TB.
 
I thought i'd read a while ago that they were starting to run into problems increasing the amount of data that can be stored on each platter.

Taking a look at the sudden size increase for flash storage, my guess is that some form of flash storage is more likely for storing a petabyte than the traditional mechanical hard drive.
 
Efour said:
we will never see a mechanical 1 PB HDD.
Click to expand...

I think this is the case also. My prediction is that there will be a minor flood in Taiwan and waferfab makers will suddenly increase prices, citing destroyed stock, even though they had plenty of stock in Europe (Belgium and Holland specifically) This will stall innovation while hard disk manufacturers reap increased prices for a few years.

The physical size of the hard drive won't change, it will just become full of SSD. We will also see a move from SATA to nexGen PATA around 2021 with SSD becoming as quick as the bus can handle. The bus won't be called PCI something and will cost a premium to implement.
 
As was said - if we do (which I doubt in the next 25 years) - it will not be mechanical.

We have essentially reached the max. theoretical storage per square inch on traditional drives due to the superparamagnetic effect.

Look up the theory behind the new HAMR drives - which essentially should give us around 30TB in one drive at most - if it actually proves reliable/stable and cost effective - but for the next 10 - 20 years, unless there is a monumental breakthrough in memory chips, or a new type of magnetic material - forget about it - physics just doesn't let us go any magnetically smaller.
 
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