Global Geek News Blog

For many years, computers have evolved and changed with the demands of consumers. Hard drives are no exception. Although for the past several years, hard drives are virtually the same, storage capacities have greatly increased.

I have owned a small handful of computers in my nearly 19 year existence, as well as have worked on hundreds more. The one thing that I have noticed with the usage of each computer is the size of the hard drive.

For at least eight years I have been using a computer that has a hard drive of 4GB. Back when I was younger and this was my primary computer, this huge amount of storage seemed nearly impossible to completely use. I was very wrong.

It didn’t take long for games to begin requiring nearly the same amount of space as was contained on this single hard drive. I finally decided that more space was required for more computing, so a 40 GB hard drive was purchased, which it wasn’t long before that proved to be a small drive.

Now I am running multiple desktops and laptops with hard drives of over 100GB, which many days still seems small. As games, business applications and other programs have come to take up more resources, the hard drive industry has been forced to evolve its technology to meet the demands of modern society.

The top storage capacities of consumer hard drives are currently toping out at around 500GB. While this may be more than enough for many computer users, there are many like myself who see this as small because of the dozens of games, thousands of songs, and hundreds of hours of video we keep stored on our computers.

Later this year, consumers will have access to 750GB drives and 1 Tera byte drives for their desktops by the end of next year. Notebook storage is expected to hit 200GB by the end of next year. Even with these evolutionary leaps in technology, storage prices continue to remain affordable with the availability of newer, bigger hard drives.

Flash Memory

With the sales of traditional hard drives expected to hit $41.5 billion by 2010, up from today’s $27.9 billion in sales, the flash memory industry is also expected to grow in size and sales. In 2005, flash memory sales totaled a record $10.6 billion, a figure which is expected to grow to $18.7 billion by 2010.

Flash memory is gaining in favor because its lack of moving parts which makes for greater reliability as well as portability. With current flash memory, the 4GB hard drive in my old computer could easily be worn around me neck and taken anywhere. Flash memory, often smaller than a tube of Chapstick allows for the fast transfer of large amounts of data.

SanDisk Corp., the world’s largest supplier of flash memory storage cards predicts the ability to carry 32GB of data on flash memory cards in portable gadgets within five years. Bill Healy, the Senior V.P. of Hitachi Global Storage Technologies Inc. recently unveiled his concept of the future, 1TB of storage on a flash storage medium slightly larger than a quarter. However, this concept is still several years down the road.

With the rapid changes in the data storage industry, the constant remains that as long as consumers need greater storage capacity, companies such as SanDisk, Seagate and Hitachi will continue to develop even smaller drives with greater storage capacity.

-Jeremy Bray

Global Geek News