Hard drives are getting too big. In a recent article I read, Sci-Tech Today.com reported that Hitachi will soon be releasing drives that have over 1TB of storage density PER SQUARE INCH. That is insane!
Imagine a hard drive that has 4TB of storage in one single drive. First, that amount of storage is just huge for a single drive. Second, if you put that in a network environment the density of the drive would be such that with sufficient services accessing the data, you would quickly max out the throughput and wouldn’t even get half the benefit of such a large drive.
Second, with such high density the susceptibility of the drive to corruption from outside forces (i.e. — electromagnetic interference) would increase exponentially.
I still think making current drives more efficient and faster is a far better return on technological advancement than trying to cram more and more data into a single drive. If you need more than 500GB of storage, you should be using an array not a single drive.
-Chris
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