For those that haven’t believed our calculations on miniature storage devices, we have it this week from the market leader Seagate, which says that it has been doing it sums latterly and reckons that it can put 1 terabyte of data on a single 1.8 inch drive by 2014.
People often think that disk drives are for PCs and forget about the implications of storage power. Whenever we speak about video we point out there are three ways it can travel ‘ broadcast through the air or across a network, narrowcast point to point or carried on a physical medium – and it’s always the last option that people most often fail to consider where video is concerned.
No-one gives a second thought to the 1 GB of PC data they carry around on a flash memory stick but never consider video traveling in this way, except for perhaps on a pre-written DVD, because video files are so heavy.
In our own mobile TV report Faultline projected that by 2011 a mobile handset will have 20 GB of storage as standard and that in QVGA format this would mean 80 hours of video, or 20 hours of SD video or 4 hours of HD video, stored on a handset.
Well if you take the Seagate calculations for 1.8 inch drives (rather than 1 inch or under for handsets) we are looking at 50 times that capacity on an iPod, in a timeline that’s about 3 years further out. So that’s 4000 hours of QVGA video, 1,000 SD video and 200 hours of HD video. Networks will have trouble moving data around as conveniently as that making the best way to carry your video collection on a portable video player
And it will happen first on a 2.5 inch a year earlier, in 2013, Seagate said, so all that capacity on your PC first.
Why would Seagate bother to put this much storage power on a portable device when it can continue to sell at the existing 180 GB level for some time to come? Well quite simply the storage area has heated up partly because Hitachi is breathing down Seagate’s neck in the race to bring perpendicular recording techniques to the market, which will give storage a huge boost, but also the rise and rise of flash memory threatens to replace disk drives entirely on many devices.
Hard drives are cheaper per GB and the larger capacities are out of reach of Flash right now, whereas Flash is more resilient, lighter and uses less power. And Flash is being driven by multiple companies led by Korean market leader Samsung, along with Toshiba, Intel, Micron, Fujitsu, AMD.
In the disk drive market there has been less virulent competition from a handful of players, but since the aggressive shift in Flash memory to higher storage levels, the disk drive market has had to accelerate its horizons once more.