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Processors, operating systems and graphics-rich applications such as online games tend to be held up as the glamour products of the technology world, even though hard drives, with their mind-boggling advances, deserve just as much of the spotlight. But the perennially broke platter industry still gets overlooked: In the jungle that is high tech, the hard drive is the bandicoot.
Invented in 1956, hard-drive platters have seen their capacity increase more than 60 percent a year since 1991, putting the industry on par with the semiconductor industry.
To survive, the hard-drive industry has historically had an Elvis-like flair.
As a result of the increases, massive amounts of data can now be stored on desktop computers. Earlier this year, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies came out with a 400GB drive. That's room for about 200 movies or 20 years' worth of a weekly sitcom.
Which is good, because the amount of data out there is growing. In 2002, approximately 5 exabytes (5 billion gigabytes) of new data was inserted onto paper, optical disks, film and electronic storage devices, according to the How Much Information? project at the University of California at Berkeley.
"If digitized with full formatting, the 17 million books in the Library of Congress contain about 136 terabytes of information; five exabytes of information is equivalent in size to the information contained in 37,000 new libraries the size of the Library of Congress book collections," the report stated. Hard drives absorbed about 2 exabytes of the total.
The report also found that 400,000 terabytes of e-mail get produced per year, as do 274 terabytes of instant messages. (A terabyte is a million million bytes.) The surface Web--the Web people can access--contains about 170 terabytes of data.
Meanwhile, manufacturers have applied the principles of density to make physically small drives and so change consumer electronics. These minidrives don't hold as much data as larger platters, but they can fit in a lot. Apple Computer was first to tap into this ability with its iPod digital music player, which incorporates a Toshiba drive that measures 1.8 inches in diameter.
"Everyone else stood back and watched and said, 'Go ahead,'" said Maciek Brzeski, the vice president of marketing for Toshiba's storage division.
Since then, Cornice, Hitachi and others have begun to promote 1-inch drives for consumer electronics. Over the coming months, Sony, Philips and others plan to bring out music players, storage keys and digital cameras with minidrives.
Consumers clearly go nuts over storage. Earlier this month, a number of people got giddy when they believed that Google was giving 1 terabyte of storage to subscribers to Gmail, its e-mail service.
Forget that the Gmail service is embroiled in controversy, with privacy advocates alleging (with almost no foundation) that the service violates wiretapping laws.
Forget also that no one will ever use it. Google already offers Gmail subscribers 1GB of free storage. It would take up to 30 feet of books to print 800MB on paper, according to the How Much Information? survey.
TiVo and the rest of the members of the video-on-demand industry exist largely because of cheap drives.
There's a more important principle at stake with Gmail: It's free. Rivals Yahoo and Lycos had no choice but to up the storage on their e-mail sites.
TiVo and the rest of the members of the video-on-demand industry exist largely because of cheap drives. Next year, drives will likely become instrumental in the film industry. For example, Revelations Entertainment, actor Morgan Freeman's production company, has said that in 2005, it will release a movie onto the Internet on the same day it comes out in theaters.
As an added bonus, the hard-drive industry has historically had an Elvis-like flair. Al Shugart, who helped create the hard drive at IBM and later founded Seagate Technology, comes across like a retired FBI agent on vacation. He wears Hawaiian shirts, smokes cigarettes and talks about the crazy stuff his dog does around the house.
"In my only Shugart interview, he took his shoes off in the middle of it and put them on the table," recalled a reporter who has worked in the industry for about two decades. "Then he sent his limo driver out for a huge sack of McDonald's."
Finis Connor, who founded hard-drive maker Conner Peripherals (now part of Seagate), was known to have one of the largest offices in the Western Hemisphere, according to those who hiked across it.
The only thing missing is profits. Typically, hard-drive companies lose money or barely eke out a margin. A gigabyte of storage at retail costs about 50 cents to 80 cents. Large purchasers get it for far less. Google's costs on Gmail are likely minimal, said Jim Porter, president of research firm Disk/Trend.
"In the mid-'80s, there were about 76 hard-drive manufacturers," Porter said. "Now, depending on how you count it, you can get to maybe 10."
Will the outlook improve? Probably not greatly. Stuart Parkin, an IBM research fellow, recently extrapolated that the entire output of the drive industry in the near future will be capable of storing all the data ever produced. That's why IBM sold off its drive business to Hitachi, he explained.
To survive, manufacturers will have to manage their expenses tightly, Porter said. Nonetheless, when the next 400,000 terabytes of e-mail come in, the drive makers will be there.
Biography
Michael Kanellos is editor at large at CNET News.com, where he covers hardware, research and development, start-ups and the tech industry overseas. He has worked as an attorney, travel writer and sidewalk hawker for a time share resort, among other occupations.
See more CNET content tagged:
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http://p2pnet.net/story/1211
http://p2pnet.net/story/1385
Storage of tommorrow to make today's technology
the buggy whip of the past according to the press articles.
an IBM research fellow, recently extrapolated that the entire
output of the drive industry in the near future will be capable of
storing all the data ever produced. That's why IBM sold off its
drive business to Hitachi, he explained.>>
(1) iPods can't be made fast enough because the hard drives
needed are in short supply.
(2) ALL Hollywood (and Hollywood wannabe) moviemaking now
requires hard drives. And more movies are being made than ever
before. Don't get me started on what happens when iMax movies
go completely digital. And when your local cineplex's projector
goes digital - as it inevitably will, movies will be delivered and
stored on hard drives. With backups.
(3) Broadband is increasing. That means bigger and bigger files
will be sent, AND more people will get them. Filmmakers now
give away trailers for download. That sort of thing will only
grow. Music is cheaper to sell online - and as broadband
increases, the movie industry will discover the same thing,
piracy or not.
(4) ALL cameras will soon be digital. (In fact I think Kodak
recently stopped making consumer-level film.) Research shows
that people take FAR MORE pictures digitally than they ever took
using film cameras. Where will the images be stored? Or do you
think we should just delete Grandma?
(5) I just bought a Terrabyte drive. I had to wait months for it,
because the manufacturer was so heavily backordered. Who
needs THAT much space? Obviously, someone besides me.
(6) New desktop-editing tools like Final Cut Pro and the faster
machines that drive them demand HUGE drives for editing. So
for every copy of a program like Final Cut, ring up at least one
new drive JUST for that work.
(7) HDTV? Changes the whole equation re hard drive space
needed for storage.
(8) DVRs being thrown into the deal when you order satellite or
cable? Ditto. And hey, when I do the replay/pause thing with my
cable remote, that means the cable company has a hard drive
whirring away somewhere.
(9) You say NFL officials take too long when reviewing flags?
Hard drives offer instant rewind. They're already being used by
NHL coaches to evaluate team play on the fly. Some of that
(maybe most of it) gets stored for evaluation LATER, too. Watch
that trend spread to other teams and other sports. Stack of
video tapes with missing labels, or a hard drive with a search
engine - which would YOU want to use when you're a coach
evaluating EACH YEAR'S college draft?
(10) How fast IS the 'net growing? It all goes on hard drives, of
course - and the faster they are, the better.
(11) Cheap DNA testing for criminal investigations? Digital
genetic evaluations to see if I might get a rare disorder (or my
children might inherit one)? Great! Where you going to keep that
data, on paper?
(12) Online music sales are expected to double next year. That
means you need a drive for an iPod AND one attached to your
computer, so the tunes can be shuttled back and forth. No one
outside of Karl Lagerfeld (don't ask) keeps their music ONLY on
their iPods.
(13) Email is now routinely used to prosecute white collar
criminals. For that reason, most states have laws mandating that
corporations keep employee email. And they don't want it
printed and bound, either... guess what THAT means...
(13) Oh and one last thing. All the data that's being stored on
drives now? That data needs to reside on at least two
INDIVIDUAL drives. Or weren't you going to back up your life's
work?
Those are ONLY the high points. Hard drive manufacturing may
be a demanding business, but you made it sound as if these
things were piling up in a warehouse somewhere. Forget the "all
the data ever produced" garbage. More data is produced each
year than in the five years or ten years or fifty years that
preceded it because the means for producing said data is
ubiquitous. Space is cheaper, but the demand is insatiable. Are
hard drives a commodity? Sometimes. But aluminum is a
commodity, too, and people have made fortunes making it.
IBM quit the business because making drives is not what they do
best, NOT because no one wants hard drives anymore. They
want to focus on creating and refining new processes. They'll
pioneer a method for packing more data on a disk and sell the
technology, not oversee an assembly line.
So, there used to be 75 hard drive manufacturers and now there
are ten? You SHOULD have asked how many drives those 75
manufacturers USED to make and how many the 10 make today.
You should have asked how big the hard drive pie was then and
how big it is now?
(mmmm hard drive pie,,,,, gargle...)
So you write about TECHNOLOGY? Really?
Anyway let me illustrate this plainly. Moore's Law simply put means that processor speed will double, and data density will double approximately every 17 months or so. It is also widely held that this will hold for at least the next two decades or so.
What does this mean...
(20 years) * (24 months/year) / (17 months/cycle)
This gives us roughly 14 cycles of Moore's Law. Think about this in terms of your 1 terabyte drive.
(1 terabyte)*(2^14) = 16384 terabytes of information, or 16,384,000 gigabytes.
That's:
3,485,957 Single layer DVD's
1,927,529 Double layer DVD's
655,360 Single layer Blu-Ray (HD-DVD's)
327,680 Double layer Blu-Ray (HD-DVD's)
Roughly speaking if you were to fill up that drive with high-definition movies, you would have about 150 years worth of non-stop viewing pleasure.
Anyway, I think I've made my point.