A Good Hardware Story

Where’s My Petabyte Disk Drive?

Brian Hayes | March 27, 2016

Fourteen years ago I noted that disk drives were growing so fast I couldn’t fill them up. Between 1997 and 2002, storage capacity doubled every year, allowing me to replace a 3 gigabyte drive with a new 120 gigabyte model. I wrote:

Extrapolating the steep trend line of the past five years predicts a thousandfold increase in capacity by about 2012; in other words, today’s 120-gigabyte drive becomes a 120-terabyte unit.

Extending that same growth curve into 2016 would allow for another four doublings, putting us on the threshold of the petabyte disk drive (i.e., 10151015 bytes).
None of that has happened. The biggest drives in the consumer marketplace hold 2, 4, or 6 terabytes. A few 8- and 10-terabyte drives were recently introduced, but they are not yet widely available. In any case, 10 terabytes is only 1 percent of a petabyte. We have fallen way behind the growth curve.

15.36TB monster that talks to host systems over a 12Gbps Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) interface. Source: http://techreport.com/news.x

<more at http://bit-player.org/2016/wheres-my-petabyte-disk-drive; related articles and links: http://bit-player.org/wp-content/extras/bph-publications/AmSci-2002-05-Hayes-disk-drives.pdf  (Terabyte Territory. Brian Hayes. American Scientist. Volume 90, Number 3,
May–June, 2002, pages 212–216.) and https://news.samsung.com/global/samsung-now-introducing-worlds-largest-capacity-15-36tb-ssd-for-enterprise-storage-systems (Samsung Introduces World’s Largest Capacity (15.36TB) SSD for Enterprise Storage Systems. March 3, 2016)>