The future of the humble hard drive
There’s life in the old disk yet – we explain the latest HDD technologies
Solid-state flash storage is much faster and smaller than hard drive storage, making it a favorite of Apple for its devices, with hard drives becoming less common – and often, where they are used, they’re combined with flash storage in a Fusion Drive. You might expect that the falling cost of flash storage will make hard drives obsolete eventually, but hard drive manufacturers have a few tricks up their sleeve yet that will keep the technology ahead of the cost-per-gigabyte curve.
Over the next couple of years, new technologies will allow hard drive manufacturers to potentially double the storage density of drives (albeit in more expensive, high-end drives), and they predict that it could double again by 2020.
Currently, drive manufacturers are launching models that can fit more spinning platters of disks inside their enclosures by sealing the drives and filling the empty space with helium rather than air, which reduces the drag as they operate. More platters means more storage capacity in the same space. However, these are expensive to produce at the moment, so may not become widespread in consumer drives. They’re useful for data centers, though, since they also reduce power consumption.
The next big jump will be “heat assisted magnetic recording,” which is exactly what it sounds like: the disk is heated by a laser when it’s being written to, which allows for data to be written more densely. This technology is still in the development stage, but it’s thought it could be used in commercially sold drives by 2018 or 2019. It’s quite likely that hard drives will ultimately lose their place in Apple’s consumer computers over time, due to the power, size, and speed advantages flash drives have. Flash drives are also better for those who need a huge amount of storage in the small space – you can buy a 15TB SD in the form factor of a 2.5-inch hard drive. But that SSD costs $9,690, so it remains… niche.
For those who need large drives at low cost – for personal external file storage and backups, or for business data-center use (since the cloud is only getting more and more important) – hard drives will be clicking and whirring for a few more years yet.