Mass storage industry stagnating

anything I don't mind · 4 Jul 2014 at 18:36

SSD have provided a brilliant leap forward in terms of performance but we have yet to see a drastic increase in capacity from the traditional hard disk. There has been mentions of new technologies offering much higher data storage capacity but we are yet to see any commercialised. Why is that? What is holding back 10tb+ drives from becoming available? It has been at least 10 years since we have seen significant improves in storage capacity. There has been some recent advancements to 4tb but they seem to be reaching the limit of that technology.

Surveyor · 4 Jul 2014 at 21:41

anything I don't mind said:
It has been at least 10 years since we have seen significant improves in storage capacity.

Looking back to 2004 400GB was the largest HDD sold by OcUK and it cost nearly £250.

4TB drives are commonly available now for half that price so the price/GB is a twentieth of what it was 10 years ago.

6TB drives are also becoming available.

I'd say we have seen a significant increase in both capacity and price/GB over the last 10 years.

Rroff · 4 Jul 2014 at 21:44

TBH these days storage space has outpaced average desktop user usage and those with ultra high storage requirements tend to be able to afford high end NAS/SAN type setups.

anything I don't mind · 8 Jul 2014 at 12:41

I don't disagree that we have seen significant improvements in capacity and speed over the last 10 years. I just think the last 3 years we seem to have hit the limits of the current technology. I already have several 3tb drives in my desktop. What we could do with is some new 10tb or 20tb drives that can replace all our existing drives.

Hopefully we see some more innovation in this department as we did with the speed and the SSD. I keep reading about new high capacity technology but they don't see to ever make it to the market.

LordBarrass · 8 Jul 2014 at 13:59

We have 6TB drives in stock now from Seagate. It will be a while before we hit the 10TB drives. Also as Internet speeds increase and cloud storage becomes cheaper people will not store everything on a HDD but will download as and when required.

But if people do need large storage devices then people are going for the NAS boxes like the Qnap and Synology drives.

Surveyor · 8 Jul 2014 at 19:01

anything I don't mind said:
I just think the last 3 years we seem to have hit the limits of the current technology.

A different question than posed in the OP.

3TB drives were launched not much more than 3 years ago and we now have drives with double that capacity.

Seagate have hinted that 8TB and 10TB drives could be available in limited quantities within a year.

Seagate hints at 8TB, 10TB hard drive launch plans

Sasahara · 8 Jul 2014 at 23:31

It looks like we have to wait a little longer for the next step, but when they arrive the increase is greater.