Your next PC

The world of storage has been relatively static for many years now – hard drives are really on old technology that has evolved many times over the years but never revolutionised. New RPMs and more advanced interfaces have led to speed improvements and dramatic volume increases, but the pace of change has been no where near as rapid as that of CPU and GPU development. Rather than look at short term SATA II drives which will differ little from that we have today, we’ll take a look a little further down the track and see what’s around the corner. So, when the time comes for hard drives to bow out, what type of storage will your future PC be using?

What: Flash memory drives
When: 2007 - 2008

Samsung demonstrated an 8-gigabit flash memory chip at the end of 2004, based on a 60-nanometre process.

Using this same design, it will be possible to store a whopping 16GB of data on a single PCB. This design is based around a 3D cell transistor structure, as well as high-dielectric gate insulating technology, and is known as NAND flash memory. Not only has this boosted the size of the storage medium, it has also dropped production costs by a massive 50%. By 2007 this capacity should have doubled to 32GB, if developments at SanDisk are anything to go by.

While these flash based drives, if they become econimoically feasible, will pale in size compared to hard drives they could still allow for flash based boot drives of incredible speed providing not only fast boot up and program loading times, but also the ability for proper suspend/resume systems that blink on at the touch of a button.

It’s very likely hybrid devices which combine both solid state memory for fast access as well as magnetic storage to satisfy the need for a large capacity, will be due in the very near future.

What: Holographic storage
When: 2010 - 2015

Today’s magnetic storage has a major limitation; it only records information on the surface of the medium in a two dimensional manner. This means there’s a whole lot of unused space. One of the major benefits of holographic storage, also known as holography, is that it’s a volumetric approach to storage. Every cubic millimetre of the storage device is used to store information. This means that it’s possible to cram much more information into even smaller devices. The theoretical limits of this technology, according to IBM at least, are several tens of terabits per cubic centimetre!

As well as offering enough storage to take care of even the most demanding leecher, holography should also boost the speed of retrieving information from our ever growing data libraries. Today’s storage devices rely upon mechanical systems to access data, but a holographic device is limited only by the speed of the lasers that are used to fetch information from the optical imprint within the device.

Holographic storage isn’t a new concept – it’s been kicked around by various white coated boffins for several decades. However, it’s only thanks to the maturation of enabling technology, such as liquid crystal displays and solid state camera chips, that it’s now becoming an affordable approach to storage.

What: RAM developments
When: 2007 - 2010

With the border between system memory and solid state storage crossing ever closer the evolution of RAM ultimately comes under our main storage heading. Today our system DRAM faces the same problems as our CPUs. It’s hitting a wall of technical complexity, fabrication costs and the limits of the physical manufacturing process – it’s only possible to shrink existing technology so far. A range of replacements are now being researched, including ferroelectric RAM (FRAM), magnetoresistive RAM (MRAM)  and phase change RAM.

MRAM is one of the most popular of these new techniques, and is under development by every major memory manufacturer. Magnetic fields are used for memory storage as opposed to the purely electronic method used by today’s DRAM, with the most common form of MRAM using memory cells based around magnetic tunnel technology. This uses minute magnets to store data, which results in a dramatic lowering of power consumption. Motorola appear to be one of the first companies to aim to use this technology in the real world, already using it as storage on some of its mobile phones.

What: Distributed storage
When: 2015+

Perhaps the most surprising method of future storage isn’t actually a storage medium at all. Thanks to the rapid evolution of the Internet and wireless networking, it makes sense that the devices of the future won’t need to have massive storage areas. Instead they’ll fetch just enough data as necessary from larger centralised storage areas which are located off-site, much like the data warehouses in use by the corporate world today.

So instead of your PC having its own large hard drive, all of your data will be hosted by a centralised data server, from which you’ll be able to retrieve it almost instantaneously thanks to the super speedy wireless network connection that will exist at the time.

Obviously for high performance applications such as gaming, a large amount of that data will still need to be stored on your device during run time, so the need for local storage devices won’t evaporate.

However, the development of streaming technologies means that it won’t be necessary to download the entire game before being able to play.

Instead it will only be necessary to download just enough to get the game started and playing, while the rest will be streamed seamlessly in the background.