DNA Storage

        By far the most futuristic of the technologies listed here, DNA storage is a concept that leverages advances in biotechnology to allow systems to store data in DNA molecules. The attractiveness of this option is that it could overcome limits of silicon to achieve very high density, storing up to 1 exabyte in a cubic millimeter of material. DNA is also very durable with a half-life of more than 500 years.

           However, before this technology could become a reality, scientists need to make considerable advances in manipulating DNA. Researchers at the University of Washington are Microsoft are collaborating to overcome those challenges, but it will likely be many years before DNA storage could become a reality.

        Perhaps the strangest new storage technology of the future is DNA. Yes, the molecule that stores biological information could be used to store other kinds of data. Harvard researchers in 2012 were able to encode DNA with digital information, including a 53,400-word book in HTML, eleven JPEG images, and one JavaScript program. DNA offers incredible storage density, 2.2 petabytes per gram, which means that a DNA hard drive about the size of a teaspoon could fit all of the world’s data on it–every song ever composed, book ever written, video ever shared. Besides the space savings, DNA is ideal for long-term storage: While you’re lucky if your hard drive lasts four years and optical disks are susceptible to heat and humidity.

Lead Harvard researcher George Church says :

“You can drop DNA wherever you want, in the desert or your backyard, and it will be there 400,000 years later.”

       DNA takes a long time to read and write to and, as you might imagine, the technology is still too expensive to be usable now. According to New Scientist, in one recent study the cost to encode 83 kilobytes was £1000 (about $1,500 US dollars). Still, scientists are encoding information into artificial DNA and adding it to bacteria. It’s like a sci-fi novel that’s currently being written and lived. DNA could be the ultimate eternal drive one day.

3D XPOINT

          

         In addition to working together on 3D NAND, Micron and Intel are also working on another innovative 3D technology that is an alternative to both flash and DRAM. 3D Xpoint (pronounced "three-dee cross-point") is still a ways from becoming available as a commercial product, but the two companies say it could be the biggest breakthrough in memory technology since the 1970s. It combines the functions of storage and memory in a single product that will be both inexpensive and fast. It's also non-volatile like flash, meaning that it retains data when the system is powered down. They say it could usher in a whole new style of system architecture and make big data processing much faster than has been possible in the past.

3D NAND

3D-Nand are built vertically like a skycrapper. 3D NAND also a new type of flash storage that can fit three times as much capacity in the same amount of space as traditional (2D) NAND flash. In fact, with 3D NAND flash, manufacturers can fit 3.5 TB of data on a solid state drive (SSD) the size of a stick of gum.

The different between 2D NAND and 3D NAND

Earlier types of NAND flash arranged memory cells in a two-dimensional grid pattern, but as the name suggests, 3D NAND also stacks memory cells in layers on top of each other, allowing for greater density, faster performance and lower costs per GB. In March 2015, Intel and Micron announced availability of 3D NAND products, which are expected to begin shipping later this year.

3D NAND

another explaination about 3D-NAND

Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR)

          SMR is a new hard drive recording technology. In the simplest terms, Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) is a new hard drive technology that allows the tracks on a platter to be layered on top of each other, just like roof shingles on a house, to increase platter density or tracks per inch (TPI). As with helium-filled drives, SMR technology allows for higher capacity on hard drives than traditional storage methods. 

           With SMR, it’s easy to see where the writer width isn’t a problem, and how a more narrow read head can benefit capacity over time so that capacity gains are only limited by the ability to shrink the reader and grain sizes.

           The reader and writer elements of today’s perpendicular magnetic recording HDDs have reached a physical limitation. Without future recording technologies, they cannot become smaller, nor can the tracks they read and write.

           SMR also achieves higher areal densities by squeezing tracks closer together. Tracks overlap one another, like shingles on a roof, allowing more data to be written to the same space. As new data is written, the drive tracks are trimmed, or shingled. Because the reader element on the drive head is smaller than the writer, all data can still be read off the trimmed track without compromise to data integrity or reliability. In addition, traditional reader and writer elements can be used for SMR. This does not require significant new production capital to be used in a product, and will enable SMR-enabled HDDs to help keep costs low.

Here another information about this SMR hard drive.

Helium Drives

          Helium-filled hard drives have lately been pushing the capacity boundaries of hard drives, which are typically filled with air. By using helium instead of air, helium-filled drives use less power to spin the disks Because helium is one-seventh as dense as air, the spinning platters in a helium drive encounter less resistance and experience almost no turbulence. they run cooler, and they can pack in more disks. Still, these high performance drives will likely only get cheaper and even more expansive–perhaps affordable enough even for consumer use.

So far, this product is commercialized by the HGST and Seagate company.

           It took some time for helium drives to move from concept to reality because it was difficult to prevent the helium from leaking out of the drives. Now, HGST and Seagate both have helium drives currently on the market, and HGST reports that of the one million helium drives it shipped in the first year of production, none experienced seal failure in the field.  Seagate helium drives have a lower cost per GB, however), the technology is still expensive. Still, these high performance drives will likely only get cheaper and even more expansive–perhaps affordable enough even for consumer use.

For further information about Helium Drives

Additional info :

In an attempt to build higher-capacity, energy-efficient hard drives, a few manufacturers have come up with a novel solution which is filling the hard drive case with helium.

As a result, manufacturers can put more platters into a drive and track data on those platters more precisely, greatly increasing drive density. It also decreases energy use, makes the drive quieter and improves reliability.

Future Storage

Today post, I would like to share about our "FUTURE STORAGE".

What is storage device??

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A storage device is any computing hardware that is used for storing, porting and extracting data files and objects. It can hold and store information both temporarily and permanently, and can be internal or external to a computer, server or any similar computing device.

          If someone from the two decades from now, traveled back in time to today, they’d probably chuckle at our use of hard drives and USB sticks, the way we now wonder how we ever survived with our past storage devices which is floppy disks and Zip drives. According to IDC estimates, the amount of data stored in the world's computer systems is doubling every two years, and is likely to continue increasing at that rate into the next decade.

          

          In order to deal with that data volume, manufacturers are looking for ways to increase storage density, or to store more information in less space. Inventors and researchers continue to push the envelope when it comes to capacity, performance, and the physical size of our storage media. i provide a few of the emerging storage technologies that may be signs of what’s on the horizonn in my another posts.