HDDs: The Next 50 Years

The hard disk drive industry is celebrating its 50th anniversary and the future has never been brighter. The industry is expected to ship as many drives in the next five years as it did in the last 50 years. Industry analysts such as Gartner, IDC and TrendFOCUS continue to forecast impressive unit and revenue growth for the global HDD market while a recent report by Harry Blount of Lehman Brothers predicted a robust 10% growth forecast for the HDD sector, outperforming the broad technology sector as a whole.

We’ve come a long way, baby. The first hard drive, the RAMAC, was shipped on September 13, 1956. It weighed 2,140 pounds and held a total of 5 megabytes (MB) of data on fifty 24-inch platters. It was available for lease for $35,000 USD, the equivalent of $254,275 in today’s dollars. Today’s hard drives can store a massive 500 gigabytes (GB) on a 3.5 inch drive. As capacities have increased, form factor has continued to shrink, so that a single 1-inch drive can store 8 GB, the equivalent of 4,000 MP3-format songs. Moore’s Law, a famous maxim of the semiconductor industry, states that the number of transistors on a chip will roughly double every eighteen months to two years. Compare that to what is happening in the hard drive industry: The HDD industry has achieved annual increases in areal density averaging approximately 100 percent since 1997. This tremendous jump in storage capacity is the result of extraordinary advances in magnetic recording technology, which has shifted from magnetoresistive (MR) recording heads in the 1990's, to giant-magnetoresistive (GMR) heads, to today’s perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR). PMR is the wave of the future and will enable hard drives to meet the continuing demand for increased storage capacities by increasing the areal density of the drive by as much as 10-fold. In fact, Seagate Technology has announced a 12 GB 1-inch drive with PMR technology anticipated to ship in Q306.

50 Years of Continuous Innovation

Since the first commercial drive was introduced in 1956, the hard disk drive industry has experienced 50 years of continuous innovation. Innovation has led to countless breakthroughs and patents, and has enabled a new era of consumer electronics products, including the Apple iPod and personal video recorders such as TiVo, as well as state-of-the-art laptops, desktops and server systems for enterprise data centers; put simply, these devices would not exist without hard drive technology supporting them. PMR, a key innovation for the hard drive industry, will reduce costs while preserving gross margins. Although a massive technological breakthrough, PMR by no means represents the end of innovation in the HDD industry. Future technologies, including things like patterned media, show the potential for another 10x or greater increase in areal densities.

It is almost impossible to imagine a world without hard drives. HDDs are ubiquitous today due to superior achievements in cost, performance, size and reliability. They have changed most aspects of our lives, including health care, banking, shopping, entertainment, the way in which we gather and store information, and take and store photographs. While flash memory has recently received considerable press as a potential mass storage medium, the reality is that flash continues to be much more expensive than hard drives. In addition to cost, HDDs also win on performance as well as cost, especially in terms of write speed.

New Opportunities

As disk drives increase in capacity and shrink in footprint, more and more manufacturers are turning to hard drives as the preferred storage element in their product designs. External tapes, DVDs, CDs and memory sticks can be cumbersome to use, whereas hard drives are built-in, making it easy to snap pictures, shoot video and download music…and since the capacities are so large, users can have all their precious content at their fingertips. Hard drives are becoming the transforming technology in consumer electronics; many devices considered commonplace today would simply not be possible without hard disk drive technology at their core. Only hard drives can satisfy consumer demand for storage in personal devices. Consumer devices using hard drives are varied and include:

o  Camcorders with tiny drives to provide DVD-quality video recording capabilities

o  MP3 players and personal media players with HDDs provide the storage capacity required for video-on-the-go, a rapidly emerging market segment

o  Digital video recorders and advanced set-top boxes depend on hard drives for high capacity storage

o  As mobile managers, PDAs and mobile phones begin to “converge” (phones with video streaming, digital photo/video and MP3 capabilities) more storage is a natural requirement and hard drives are the only storage solution that can process multiple data streams--audio and video-- simultaneously

o  External storage devices, such as hard drives for external backup, are gaining in popularity as more consumers seek to protect their data from security and other threats, or merely to preserve their data in a convenient, easily accessible and portable storage environment

o  Telematics (hard drives in automobiles), though still a nascent market, are increasingly being used to power on-board navigation/GPS systems, as well as on-board entertainment systems (including the new breed of automobiles with satellite receivers capable of downloading video and audio, just as you would at home).

These new, fast growing hard drive markets for consumer products like MP3 players, mobile phones, digital cameras, PVRs/DVRs, game consoles, navigation equipment, hand-held video players and much more are only one area of growth. The traditional enterprise, PC and notebook hard drive markets are still increasing. Unit shipments of all drives are anticipated to be robust -- even record breaking -- driven by the industry's ability to innovate for existing computing applications and breakthrough consumer products (many of which would not be possible without HDD technology). Key benefits of HDDs such as performance, cost, capacity, ease of use and form factor size are also key drivers of the industry’s rapid growth. The HDD industry continues to grow its base of IT applications while pursuing untapped markets.

Conclusion

The HDD industry looks forward to another 50 years of innovation, growth, and inclusion in new products made possible by future technologies. Its future is as golden as the anniversary it is celebrating. Unit and revenue growth are anticipated as HDDs continue to hold their lead over other forms of storage in key areas such as technology, density, performance, reliability, and cost.

About the Author

Sally Bryant is senior director of program development and communications at IDEMA, the global trade association for the HDD industry. IDEMA, celebrating its 20th anniversary, continues to play a key role in the HDD industry by providing best-in-class tradeshows, technical conferences and symposia, as well as setting technical and best-practice standards for the industry. An impartial, educational "voice" for the HDD industry, IDEMA sees a future as bright for itself as for the industry it has represented for 20 years. For more information on IDEMA, go to www.idema.org