The storage size provided by hard drives has increased in recent years. Today, many PCs ships with Terabytes of hard disk space. Solid State Drive, a Flash based storage technology might put a small dent in the storage space graph over time, but these devices will eventually catch up. They are already becoming a lot cheaper and larger in size.
Microsoft has published a new blog post over at the Building Windows 8 blog that looks at the history and future of hard drive usage in computer systems. Researchers estimate that average hard drive capacities in consumer PCs will grow to 8 Terabyte in 2015.
Source: IDC Study# 228266, Worldwide Hard Disk Drive 2011–2015 Forecast: Transformational Times, May 2011
One of the current challenges that hard disk manufacturers and developers of operating systems face is the shift to Advanced Format disks. A new scheme has been made necessary to keep up with the capacity growth. The AF scheme uses larger sector sizes to be more space efficient. First hard drives were introduced in 2009 and Microsoft expects all future storage devices to use the Advanced Format.
The upcoming operating system Windows 8 will support both types of AF disks, 512e and 4k natively. According to Microsoft, it is the first OS with full support for both types of AF disks.
The developers addressed several issues in the process:
- Introduce new and enhance existing API to better enable applications to query for the physical sector size of a disk
- Enhancing large-sector awareness within the NTFS file system, including ensuring appropriate sector padding when performing extending writes (writing to the end of the file)
- Incorporating large-sector awareness in the new VHDx file format used by Hyper-V to fully support both types of AF disks
- Enhancing the Windows boot code to work correctly when booting from 4K native disks
The move to fully support Advanced Format disks is a welcome one from a user and business perspective. Windows 8 Users do not have to worry about the hard drives that they purchase, at least not from a support point of view.
The graph above states that the average hard drive capacity will increase and that it will even pick up momentum. Until recently I would have agreed. However, I now disagree because of the ever increasing reliance on cloud storage. Local hard drive capacity will without doubt play a crucial role in the coming years but I cant see it being as important as this study suggests. That’s just my opinion though. I may very well be wrong! :p
Nobody wants to pay for cloud storage. Windows 365 is an example of cloud failure.
Did you mean Office 365, and how’s that a failure?
Yes there are failures but there are also successes such as Dropbox which is still picking up speed.
Lets think about what your average user needs large amounts of hard drive capacity for. In my eyes its just music and video. As far as music goes a massive majority of people don’t have a collection exceeding 60Gb and that isn’t likely to change. In fact, with services like Spotify, people building large music collections may become increasingly rare. The only real argument would be based upon video collections. Especially as formats like Ultra HD will require much more storage space. However, even fewer people build up large video collections than music collections. Additionally, the rental services offered by Apple, Google, Lovefilm and Blinkbox etc do the job perfectly.
I just dont see why the average computer user will require 8 TB of storage within 4 years. What could they possible need to store that would take up this kind of space? As I said before, this is just my opinion. I may very well be wrong!