Moore's Law

I am not sure how much Moore's law might apply to storage, if at all, but it sure seems to me like the storage world has really frozen of late. Used to be that every few years, hard drives would double in size, but it has been about 4 years or so since I bought my first 4tb hard drive, and that size is still holding strong as the max at a decent price point, and I dare say I think I paid less for mine 3 years ago than I would if I bought the same drive today (I paid 130 bucks for mine 3 years ago from newegg). I know we have made great advancements in the realm of flash storage, and I also get that this is the direction of the future, at least for now. Still, I keep hoping to be able to buy a moderately priced 6-8TB monster any week now, and yet it seems like years are ticking by, and that product is not showing itself. Anyone have any insight into what is taking place on the storage front? Will we ever see 8Tb monsters, and if so, how long till then? Inquiring folks who need to expand their storage arsenal, would like to know.

Moore's Law is sorta out dated and N/A anymore.

I believe I saw 6TB drives for about $250, that's not that bad really.

It's not double, but at a certain point, physics kick in. Just like we can't really go above 4Ghz processors really very easily, they are now concentrating on making them more efficient, and adding more cores.

Flash has been halving in price every so often, so that is where Moore's law is mostly kicking in.

I think you summed it up yourself, the long term future for spinning drives is bleak, with solid-state storage being where the party's at, so for Moore's Law the place to look for the next big thing is data transfer speeds, rather than storage size. Moving 8TB (or more) of data around over SATA or USB 3.0 sounds like torture.

I know it's of no use to you at the moment as you're after size, but I think these are the next step for storage.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B...=sr_1_9&sr=8-9

In the latter years of the 20th century the clock rate of CPUs was rising rapidly. When the Intel 30486 CPU was introduced in 1989 it has a maximum clock speed of 50 MHZ. Little more than a decade later in 2001 the Pentium 4 had reached 2000 MHZ. I am sure many people expected this would continue for years to come. But it could not.

It is now 2015 and commercial CPUs haven't gone much beyond 4 GHZ. To reach this level there were meny problems that needed tp be solved. But they were of a practical nature and overcome with better technology. Current problems are of a more fundamental nature. In particular there are physical limits to how small CPU transistors can be built and how fast you can move electrons. When you try to push the limits there are a multiplicity of factors that were previously of little importance but have now become overwhelming problems.

There are similar types of problems in magnetic storage. There really only 2 basic ways that storage can be increased:
1. Increase the number of platters. This has been done but the costs are high and creates many practical problems.
2. Increase storage density. This been continuing but the problems are mounting.

To go much further new technology is needed. At the present time nobody knows what form it will take. In the short term it will likely be some type of flash technology as is used in SSDs. In the longer term it will likely be something else.

Mystere said:

Not really, it's still applicable. It's just not what most people think It means. It doesn't mean things get faster every 6 months. It means the number of transistors double every 6 months. That doesn't always equal faster.

Then what is the point of adding more transistors. I thought that they were into some new kind of material.

The point of adding more transistors is to keep technology moving whilst not increasing the physical size of cpu. Without die shrinks then cpu's would be the size of your front door to your house by now.

That's why my 32 Domegemegrottebyte hard disk based on 12 femtometer technology is still only 2.5".

P.S : This message is from the future

Gary said:

Then what is the point of adding more transistors. I thought that they were into some new kind of material.

More transistors do more things. CPU's are incredibly complex things, for instance. However, this can be deceiving because.. in order to relate to Moores law, you have to compare apples to apples.

As an example, the first Core i7 "Bloomfield" had 731 Million Transistors. The Haswell-E 8 core i7 has 2.6 Billion. The XBOX one SoC has 5 Billion. The 18-core Xeon Haswell-E5 has 5.5 Billion.

See Transistor count - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

However, moore's law has slowed... Intel is now admitting that it's closer to every 2.5 years rather than 2 years that transistor count doubles.

Moore's law - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia