Flash Drives, Hard Drives and the Future of Storage

Where are we now?

As time goes on many new and innovative ways of storing data have arisen. Back in the late 1900's CD's and DVD's were incredibly popular, and were the primary way of storing data, though now in 2016, very few people ever seem to use them. The same thing may be happening now to the Hard Disk Drive in exchange for alternative methods, like SSD's, streaming, DNA and promises of quantum computers.  



Graph Showing the sales (in millions) of SSD's and HDD's from 2012 to 2017.

It comes to no surprise that over the past few years, flash data has become more fast, affordable and larger storage, leading to the increase in the number of sales for SDD's, which doesn't also account for the fact that phones use much of a similar technology to Flash drives and SSDs.

What about New Technology?

More exotic methods of storage are beginning to arise as time passes. The idea of using genetic information for storage is a new but incredible concept too. Given its power to last over 60,000 years, it has the power to revolutionise the way we store data. Not only for reliability, but capacity is unmatched by any modern day method of storage. The size of just a single gram of DNA can store 0.36 Zettabytes of data. To put that into perspective, the amount of digitally stored data is 0.5 Zettabytes, meaning just a single gram and a half could store all the digital data we have. However, the huge downfall of DNA, is it needs to be stored at a specific temperature to last or it will decay, that and the cost of $500 per single megabyte.




What's the alternatives?
One other method of storage that is being revolutionised is atomic storage, or Quantum Computing. This is not only a revolution for storage but also a new method of computing, given the new potential to use electron spin to create a 'qubit' which is like a 'bit' but allows the piece of data to be on and off at the same time unlike a bit which is only 1 or 0.
This new type of data would allow for faster computing in some ways, allowing things to be computed all at once, rather than in a set order like traditional computing.