Intel-Micron Flash Technologies just issued another increase in NAND density. This one’s manages to put 8GB on a single chip with MLC(2) technology in a 167mm square package or roughly a half inch per side.
You may recall that Intel-Micron Flash Technologies (IMFT) is a joint venture between Intel and Micron to develop NAND technology [...]

I saw a recent IEEE Spectrum article on engineering’s grand challenges for the next century and thought something similar should be done for data storage. So this is a start:

Replace magnetic storage – most predictions show that magnetic disk storage has another 25 years and magnetic tape another decade after that before they run [...]

In a previous post I discussed what it would take to store 1YB of data in 2015 for the National Security Agency (NSA). Due to length, that post did not discuss many other aspects of the 1YB archive such as ingest, index, data protection, etc. Thus, I will attempt to cover each of these [...]

Well, maybe an Exabyte a day was way too small for 2009. NSA is now reporting that they may be storing yottabytes (YB, 10**24) of data by 2015 somewhere in Utah. Later reports have NSA reducing this down to something closer to 1000 PB or so but YB of storage got me thinking.
This points [...]

In my past life, I worked for a dominant tape vendor. Over the years, we had heard a number of times that tape was dead. But it never happened. BTW, it’s also not happening today.
Just a couple of weeks ago, I was at SNW and vendor friend of mine asked if I knew [...]

A older article that I recently came across said RAID 5 would be dead in 2009 by Robin Haris StorageMojo. In essence, it said as drives get to 1TB or more the time it took to rebuild the drive required going to RAID6.
Another older article I came across said RAID is dead, all [...]

My recent post on an exabyte-a-day generated a comment that got me thinking. What we need in the world today is a universal deduped archive. Such an archive would be a repository for all information generated by the world, nation, state, etc. and would automatically deduplicate the data and back it up.
Such an [...]

Hard drives have been on a capacity tear lately what with perpendicular magnetic recording and tunneling magnetoresistive heads. As evidence of this, Seagate just announced their latest Barracuda XT, a 2TB hard drive with 4 platters with ~500GB/platter at 368Gb/sqin recording density.
Read-head technology limits
Recently, I was at a Rocky Mountain IEEE Magnetics Society seminar [...]

The BBC reported today on a new way to store digital data for 1000 years coming out of Japan (BBC NEWS | Technology | ‘Rosetta stone’ offers digital lifeline). Personally, I don’t feel that silicon storage is the best answer to this problem, and “wireless” read-back may be problematic over protracted periods of time.
Something [...]

There was a time not long ago when the title of this post wouldn’t have included SSD. But, with the history of the last couple of years, SSD has earned its right to be included.
A couple of years back I was at a Rocky Mountain Magnetics Seminar (see IEEE magnetics societies) and a disk [...]