Datastickies and the rebirth of the cassette -- the future of data storage
Remember when floppy disks really were floppy? Or the joys of loading programs on a home computer from a C15 cassette? In just over 40 years storage technology has gone from these crude devices to cloud servers that put terrabytes of space in reach of anyone.
But where does the future lie? Hardware supplier Ebuyer has produced an infographic looking at the direction storage may take in the future.
Highlights include "Datastickies", a flash drive alternative that stores information on a thin sheet like a Post-it note that can be read by sticking it to a monitor equipped with a special surface. The sheets are made of Graphene, a revolutionary material that's made up of carbon atoms in a honeycomb lattice.
Other techniques to pack more data into smaller devices include sealing helium gas inside drives. This reduces friction and produces a drive that runs cooler and faster as well as using less power. Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) writes disk tracks closer together and overlaps them allowing more data in the same space. Seagate claims this could result in a 20TB drive by 2020.
Further down the track are technologies like liquid state storage where the metal inside a drive is kept in liquid form. There's also heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) where a laser heats the disk to change its magnetic state, allowing more data to be stored per square inch.
Holographic storage is another technology with potential for the future, storing data in three dimensions using the full depth of the medium. Storing data in DNA is another possibility and has the potential to ensure information lasts forever.
And finally let's not forget our old friend the cassette. Sony has developed a new technology that can store 148GB per square inch of tape, potentially allowing a single cassette to store 185TB of data.
You can see more details of where storage has come from and where it's headed in the infographic below.
Image Credit: kavee29 / Shutterstock
