COMMENT
Past, present and future trends The History of Storage By Nick Beer, Technical Director, Dynamode
Nick Beer discusses past, present and future trends for storage media.
The last 50 years or so have seen a massive evolution of the way that data is ‘written and read’ on the magnetic material. One of the first systems used by the mainframe revolution of the early 1950s was the Uniservo system. By today’s standards it was very slow, unreliable and needed full time computer operators to forever change the spools. But at the time it was a revolution, replacing punch tape readers and allowing hardware designers such as IBM and DEC to consolidate their early data centres into smaller and more efficient units. The tape standards kept coming. IBM 7 Track, DECtape, DATA8 and the widely adopted DAT format of the late 1980s, which helped to set the trend for small office servers. Although a lot slower in access times than hard disk arrays, tape allowed a higher bit density and a much lower cost than hard disks. They continued to be the backup of choice for almost all businesses in the event of a disaster occurring. However, the physical surface area of a tape system is a finite value and although various manufacturers have come up with novel ways to increase storage densities and access speeds in recent years, the fact remains that its days may well be numbered.
The Flip Side Looking at the other side of the coin, and up to only a few years ago,
consumer based storage devices, technically known as Direct Attached Storage (DAS) has grown exponentially due to the vast amounts of consumer data that we enjoy and rely on for our everyday lives. Hard disk prices have dropped by an astonishing amount. We’ve mentioned tape systems and
hard disks so far. Both are bearing up under technological advances, hard disk systems more so. Not so many years ago, computer journalists were preaching the end of magnetic storage in hard disk systems with bubble memory, bio memory and even quantum mechanical storage envisaged to set the pace for faster and greater storage densities than we could have ever imagined a decade ago. But the truth is that these systems were hugely expensive to manufacture and design. They also suffered from being totally proprietary and thus may not work with the customer’s current kit. Again, like tape systems, hard disks
have enjoyed large increases in bit density thanks to novel techniques from the likes of Hitachi to squeeze more data onto the disk platters (such as Perpendicular Sectoring) together with improved manufacturing has greatly improved performance and reliability. To a point, that is.
Access Times Hard Disk access times have come down greatly over the past 15 years from 60 or so microseconds to
around 10 microseconds for the more advanced hard disks. However, there is a trade-off here because generally the drives need to spin faster and thus require more electrical energy to operate, thereby producing more heat in the process. This is bad enough for fixed servers looking at reducing their carbon footprint and specialised venting, but worse for mobile users because of reduced battery times. This, coupled with ‘time sensitive’ software applications such as video editing and multimedia broadcasting means that data literally needs to fly off the storage media with next to zero latency. Welcome in Solid-state Drives (SSD).
Nothing new here, StorageTek in the late 1970s produced the first commercial system, although like any ‘new’ technology in the computer industry, pricing was high and was expensive to adopt. Like all new systems, it suffered from reliability issues. Building storage devices on the humble transistor seemed a good idea at the time, although they suffered from low chip density (128Kb per square inch of space) and access times that were comparable to current hard disk arrays at the time. The technology at this point was shelved with vendors concentrating on getting more out of existing storage systems. The new SSD devices however are
a breakthrough in technology. Using DRAM they offer extreme access times in the order of 0.01 milliseconds or less, improved reliability over existing ‘mechanical’ hard disk drives, thus electrical consumption and heat output but still retaining the standard hard disk form factors and interface designs (such as SATAII) meaning that they can be integrated into any existing server or workstation as a direct replacement for mechanical devices. Although still early in its adoption from launch around a year ago for mainstream users, I’m pretty confident that SSD devices, like hard disks some years back will increase in capacity and reduce in cost as more and more companies adopt the technology. And what about the future of the trusted hard disk? I think that technology still has many more years ahead of it.
The last 50 years have seen a massive evolution in the way that data is written and read. 12 NETCOMMS europe Volume II Issue 4 2012
www.netcommseurope.com
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