Magnetic storage has reached the supetparamagnetic limit - a physical limit on how small you can make magnetic domiains that can still retain their magnetic state. Further increases in density requires new technology like helium drives to pack in more platters, shingled recording ( which has slow write performance) , or HAMR.
Great stuff guys! Appreciate the thoughts and feedback. I guess I was correct than and we really have sort of hit the limits with today's technology. Yes, you can pick up an 8TB drive today, but the price is roughly double what I paid for a 4TB drive 3.5 years ago, so there really is not much movement forward, which was the nagging sense I was having. The dollar to byte ratio if you are after shear size is roughly the same. I did a little searching and came across this interesting Forbes article which suggests potentially huge improvements coming in the future:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/tomcough...in-on-storage/
Who knows though?
Back in 1989/90, when I took a Masters in Information Studies, we had to do a group essay on the future of computing. At that time, the pundits were all saying that Silicon was nearing the limit of numbers of transistors/chip, hard disks were reaching the limit of storage, and that we had to find new technologies like optical computing, holographic storage, superconducting computers and gallium arsenide to replace Silicon.
386sx processors, 1 Mb RAM, VGA monitors and Windows 3.0, and 200MB hard disks were new and desirable - but out of range of our pockets. at more than £1500.
I am running Windows 10 on 10-year old hardware, and speed is not an issue, so something has changed, and it's not Moore's Law, it is the requirement for ever faster hardware has stopped.
128-bit computing, although the technology has been around for years, is not necessary. Even the Weather and climate forecasting number-crunching supercomputers perform with 64-bit technology. You might find your GPU uses some 128-bit processing, but that's all.
Why do you need an 8TB single point of failure in your PC when it is safer to upload to some cloud storage, and what app or OS needs 64 GB RAM to perform adequately?
When our needs start to exceed the current hardware possibilities, the Moore's Law curve will start climbing again, but someone will have to think of some new, attainable uses for computing first, and it isn't desktop apps, rocket science, medical imaging, pharmaceutical design or anything else you can think of, because anything you can think of has already been done.
In any case, Moore's 'Law' is not a 'law' - it is more like an observation of a trend for a while. It's not like the Law of Gravity or something like that, though sometimes it seems people treat it that way. It is not written into the fabric of the Universe.
Moore's law has been around long enough to call it that, Like Newton's Law of Gravity, a good enough approximation under special circumstances to hold good for most predictions.
thanks to Wikipedia
However, in a more generalized universe where you may be very close to supermassive objects moving at high relative velocities or at very small scales, it just doesn't work so well.
There may be a few physical constants or limits, but universal laws are more for metaphysics than for modern physics, in which we realize, we know so little about the cosmos and the quantum universe.
Nothing is written into the fabric of the universe. Laws are written by Men.
Except Newton's Laws aren't going to change.
Moore's law has been around long enough to call it that, Like Newton's Law of Gravity, a good enough approximation under special circumstances to hold good for most predictions.
However, in a more generalized universe where you may be very close to supermassive objects moving at high relative velocities or at very small scales, it just doesn't work so well.
There may be a few physical constants or limits, but universal laws are more for metaphysics than for modern physics, in which we realize, we know so little about the cosmos and the quantum universe.
Nothing is written into the fabric of the universe. Laws are written by Men.
Everyone has different needs. I support hospital radiology archives from my home, and strangely enough I have more storage than many of the hospital's I support. My desire for an 8 terabyte drive is mainly to serve as a stash pit or backup, to prevent data loss. I mostly have 2 copies of all of my files, but an extra 8 terabytes to easily and cheaply back things up to would be welcome.
Actually, they can. Sort of. There are many factors that go into physics. For instance, a force working against another force can counteract it, and make it appear to violate laws of gravity. A favorite bar-trick of mine uses Equilibrium to counteract gravity.
Balancing Forks on the Tip of a Toothpick Trick - YouTube
Of course this doesn't REALLY change the law, but it does alter its effects.
Quote