Storage Goes Main Street – Drive On!

Information storage is a principal, "main street" factor in information processing systems, from large IT applications to smaller consumer-based uses. HDDs (hard disk drives) have been the dominant storage technology for over 50 years. Will HDDs continue to dominate storage applications? Or will flash memory and SST (solid-state technology) take over storage? What does the future hold for HDDs and SST? Is the future, as we’ve been saying at IDEMA, cooperative? Or does the storage industry face a "Battle Royal"? IDEMA has brought some of the greatest minds in the information storage industry together at DISKCON USA 2007 to help answer these questions, and more.

Consumer Electronics: One of the largest growth areas for information and content storage is consumer electronics. These devices, enabled by the constantly decreasing cost per gigabyte of HDD and flash memory, include music players (MP3 – flash memory and HDD), TV show storage (DVR, PVR, and HDD-enabled TVs), video and still cameras (flash memory and HDD, cellular phones (flash memory), Automobiles (GPS, entertainment - HDD), hand-held devices (Blackberry, Pocket PCs, etc.) and backup storage devices for the home (HDD). These applications pose special requirements where "ruggedness" (reliability and robustness for hand-held devices and automobiles), operational temperatures and humidity (automobiles, PVRs and TVs), noise (home bedroom), speed (for gaming applications), and power (all battery operated devices), present new challenges to the drives. Will SST become the dominant storage technology in this area? Key executives from Toshiba, Seagate, Samsung, Western Digital, Fujitsu, and Hitachi GST will discuss this at the DISKCON conference.

The Digital Home: As digital home storage requirements increase, we need new ways to organize, backup and manage our personal and commercial content. There are many options: Will digital storage be direct attached or networked? Will content be downloaded to individual devices or streamed from a centralized home storage location? How will this content be protected, shared and moved quickly, legally and reliably between various CE devices? What will be the dominant interfaces, applications, and services for managing and distributing content? What will drive the use of network storage in the home and when will all home and personal storage be networked? What role will wireless technologies play to help accelerate adoption? Is this a "HDD-only" market or will SSTs play a role? Senior executives from Buffalo, Marvell, Seagate, Scientific Atlanta, and SanDisk come together at DISKCON to share their views.

What’s Next: While a steady stream of innovations have enabled HDD products to provide extremely high density, cost effective mass storage, several alternative storage approaches have been under development and commercialized over the years. We are now at a point where not only are Solid State Storage devices dominating the hand held storage market, there is now competition from this sector for traditional HDD applications in the personal computing space. How will these emerging storage concepts and products, such as MRAM, NAND/NOR Memory, Phase Change Memory and Holographic Storage, compare with traditional rotating magnetic storage? But don’t rule out HDDs yet—HDDs have a long (over 50 years) history of innovations which have resulted in unprecedented capacity increases while concurrently reducing price per gigabyte. Two major future innovations, patterned bit media and heat assisted recording, are being explored now to extend both capacity and price trends for HDD products. Hear technology leaders from Hitachi GST, Seagate, Toshiba, STEC, SanDisk, Samsung, Ovonyx, Samsung, Freescale, Maxell and Intel discuss what’s on the horizon for HDDs and SSDs at DISKCON.

IDEMA addresses your questions at its DISKCON Trade Show and Conference, taking place on September 19-20^th at the Hyatt Regency Hotel / Santa Clara Convention Center. I am looking forward to seeing you at DISKCON USA 2007!

Joel Weiss
IDEMA