The Future of Data Storage Technologies

Ever since the first memory device was invented — initially bulky, limited, and sluggish, — researchers and inventors have been pushing the limits beyond what’s possible in terms of data storage. 

Since then, data storage technologies have been greatly improved not only in the physical size of the storage media but also in its performance and capacity. 

Today, businesses and organizations of all sizes need to manage and protect growing volumes of data. 

In addition, new data protection requirements from the government, like HIPAA regulations, for instance, compliance or legal department, can add significant costs to storage projects.

As a result, it is critical for IT managers to adopt data storage solutions that allow them to reduce costs without compromising performance or reliability.

Even for personal needs, the available new options of data storage devices target a wide range of volume and budget. 

Top Summary: There are several techniques commonly used by modern data storage technologies and they just keep evolving. These new data storage solutions are being designed to help businesses and individuals manage data growth and meet any compliance requirements while still reducing storage costs.

What is Data Storage?

Basically, computer data storage is any technology used to record and retain digital data. 

Data storage is mainly divided into magnetic, optical, or mechanical media. But regardless of form, data storage needs an actual device to retain data in. Data storage devices are labeled into two categories: 

Direct Area Storage

Also known as Direct-Attached Storage (DAS), this is the data storage category we are all familiar with. As its name suggests, the data storage is directly connected to the computer accessing it. Hard Disk Drives (HDD); Solid State Drives (SSD); Solid State Hybrid Drives (SSHD); Floppy Disks; Optic Compact Disks (CD); Digital Video Disks (DVD); Flash Drives, External USB Drives, among others, all fall within this category.  

Network-Based Storage

Unlike DAS, Network-Based Storage allows more than one computer to access the data storage device through a network connection. It’s great for data sharing and collaboration needs. The most common setups are Network-Attached Storage (NAS) and Storage Area Network (SAN). It can combine multiple types of devices for RAID array for example, and/or include cloud data storage.

Summary: Data storage solutions are divided into different media and devices, directly attached to a computer or accessed through a network. Businesses and users can choose and tailor a data storage set up to meet their capacity, reliability, performance speed, costs, or even physical space needs. Find more information on How to Determine What Storage System to Use in a RAID: DAS, NAS, or SAN.

 

The Need for New Data Storage Solutions

It was just a couple of decades ago that messing around with fragile CD/DVDs and incapacious floppy disks were considered an unprecedented technology breakthrough. 

Today we’re used to data storage devices with schemes that are smaller than a postage stamp. Just click on that “save” button, and watch the data whisking off straight into the cloud data storage. 

Well, that’s how we barely ran out of space. With the 3.7 billion people generating nearly 2.5 quintillion bytes of information every day, data centers are scarcely able to handle existing demand. 

Moreover, according to global scientific predictions, by 2025 the world will come to numbers like 160 zettabytes of data being produced per year. This is more than the number of stars in the observable universe!  

Another thing to be concerned about is the environmental factor. As proven in a recent study, 7 percent of the total carbon footprint caused by technology is due to data centers. 

So try to wrap your mind around this one: a single data center is able to consume more power than a medium-size town, according to scientific research. 

Thankfully, there are hundreds of talented scientists and dedicated inventors around the world who set about seeking better alternatives and tirelessly working on the proper data storage solutions to the situation we got into. 

Ahead, we’ve gathered the most mind-boggling inventions and game-changing technologies, with a brief overview of each, in order to shed some light on concepts that might be adopted worldwide in foreseeable future.

Helium Drives

The hard drives we’re presently working with consist of rapidly spinning platters that rotate at a given speed. However, the air they’re filled with adds a fair amount of drag on those platters, due to which a fair amount of additional energy is required to rotate them.

With that in mind, researchers soon hit upon the idea of replacing the air inside of a hard drive with helium. They assumed that using helium, since it’s lighter than air (as we all know from the basic school chemistry course), should significantly reduce the resistance — and thereby the required amount of energy. 

The most difficult part, however, was the fact helium tends to escape from everywhere. For this reason, it took years for the manufacturers to come up with a hard drive that not only could cope with refraining helium inside, but also function properly. Eventually, it worked! 

Helium drives had soon gone further than just a concept: they became commercially available in November 2013 — with the first helium-filled hard disk being introduced to the general public by HGST, a Western Digital subsidiary. 

What is even more shocking, it took less than 4 years for this first 6TB helium-filled disk — a completely unique data storage device at that moment — to evolve into 12, 14, and 16TB hard drives, today offering today the highest performance of all known.

On the other hand, performance is not the only obstacle we yet have to overcome. Most current data storage devices must adhere to a standard form factor — either 2.5in or 3.5in — to fit in standard computer cases. This limits the physical area of hard drive platters, and thus the overall capacity. 

The solution to this packaging problem would be increasing data density thousands of times, by stuffing more bytes into the same surface area. But how challenging is that?

DNA Data Storage

How do you like the idea of keeping various kinds of data within a molecule that nature invented to store biological information in? If you find it a curious, yet way too unrealistic data storage technology at the same time — we agree.

Nonetheless, in 2012 Harvard researchers managed to encode DNA with digital data, namely — eleven JPEG images, an HTML book consisting of 53.400 words, and a JavaScript program in addition. 

The most mind-blowing thing about DNA is thus the incredible storage density it offers, which is equal to 2.2 petabytes per gram. Just try to imagine it: a DNA hard disk about the size of a teaspoon would be capable of fitting all of the world’s data on it.

Of course, the DNA-storage method won’t be implemented soon because of two, pretty obvious, reasons. First, it takes an extremely long time to read and write to DNA. Secondly, the technology is yet way too expensive to be usable now: the cost to encode 83 kilobytes was about $1.500 US dollars, reported New Scientist.  

Frozen Data

Another astounding next-gen data storage technology has been developed in the U.K. 

Researchers from the University of Manchester created molecules that one day could store hundreds of times more data than the mightiest hard disk we know today — while refraining it in a materially smaller form factor. The catch is that it needs to be kept extremely cold in order to function.

This method, if works, will lead to a very useful technology called “single-molecule magnets”. 

Such magnets, due to their ability to remember the direction of an applied magnetic field over relatively long periods of time, may be able to store data and be “written”. All the while representing sizes many times smaller than existing magnetic materials we use to store information. 

“Using single-molecule magnets, we could potentially make data storage media that is 100 times denser than current technologies such as HDDs and SSDs, which are facing their own limitations for data density,” explains Dr. Nicholas Chilton, a senior lecturer and Royal Society University Research Fellow in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Manchester.

Which, however, might be even more important, adoption of the frozen data storage technology might be an all-embracing solution. Since data centers would require supercooling technology to use it, a significant reduction in their carbon footprint would be included. 

Therefore, in addition to lower operating costs and greater energy efficiency, the implementation of “cold molecules” could also become a substantial measure for us to be less damaging to the environment. 

5D Optical Data Storage

Cold molecules didn’t impress you quite enough? Let us then introduce you to another revolutionary data storage technology that is being presently elaborated by researchers of the U.K.’s University of Southampton, namely glass.

Basically, 5D storage will imply terabytes of data being carved into tiny glass disks in multiple layers — including the usual three dimensions — with femtosecond laser writing. 

The key of enormous capacities the technology promises is in 5D. With the orientation and size of structures imprinted onto the surface of the disk, we might achieve five degrees of freedom for the data to be stored.

Okay, small pieces of glass are not going to overwhelm you. But the longevity of such a data storage solution surely will. When compared to the vulnerable magnetic tapes, which typically last no longer than a decade, 5D optical storage devices have thermal stability up to 1.800 degrees Fahrenheit. 

Summary: As more and more capacity is needed, researchers and data storage companies around the globe are working around the clock to discover or employ new technologies. Helium, DNA, Frozen Data, and 5D Optical Data Storages seem to guide the future of data storage solutions. 

The Future of Data Storage

All of these data storage technologies will have to solve plenty of bottleneck issues before they are seen in our daily life. Costs of implementation and data recoverability are definitely the main issues, otherwise, any new trend will be impractical. 

What trends have you seen in data storage technology that can help businesses become more efficient with their use of capital and resources? How could new data storage technologies impact compliance requirements?

How could a company begin evaluating new data storage technologies without spending too much money or effort on a trial-and-error basis? What criteria would be important to consider when choosing a data storage solution for an organization?

For what it’s worth until the infinite machines are created, we must be content with the data storage progress of today. This includes operational systems that sporadically greet us with Blue Screens of Death and hard drives that eventually crash.

Summary: Modern trends in data storage technology can help businesses handle continuing growth in the volume of data while still maintaining protection capability and improving performance and compliance at a lower cost.

So, in case some imperfect device of today has let you down and lost any of the important information it stored — make sure to contact SalvageData. Our team of dedicated, highly-qualified technicians can get your vital data back in the shortest terms possible!