Phoenix Research and Designs

"Internet Corner" Articles

The Future of Storage

Society of Georgia Archivists Newsletter, Volume 42, Issue 1, Spring 2010 [PDF]

We do permanent storage. That is our niche. However, computers and their storage capacity is something that we worry about, both as consumers and professionals. The data that is “saved” during a session is somehow magically transformed into a file that can be retrieved at a later date. This data is not eye-readable if you open up that little box, but you take it on faith that it still lives somewhere in there. How exactly does it all work? How can scientists and other researchers manage to get more and more data in smaller and smaller spaces?

Reading through some of the articles out there is like reading a philosophy manual, unless you are already technologically inclined. If you haven't delved into the more geeky literature in a while, there are new buzzwords of which every archivist should be aware. Our researchers and patrons may ask us at the reference desk if some of the records are being stored on SSDs or if we have “cloud-storage” platforms.

In addition, archivists may be wary of storing so much information in such a small space. Scratch a vinyl record, and you have lost some data, but not too much. Scratch a CD, and even more data is lost. The damage may not be discovered until too late if no backups or redundancies have been built in to the process. Migration and backups, perhaps with cloud-storage systems, should be automatically considered when working with electronic media.

Some common terms will be described to help today's busy archivist understand what is going on in this field without having to be a scientist. As information professionals, it's helpful if we know what is being developed and used. There is not enough space in this article to go too much into depth about each storage medium, so please see the “Further Reading” section.

Perpendicular Recording (Magnetic)

At this point, magnetic storage and magnetic recording are familiar mediums. What is new is the way that data will soon be stored. Up until now, the information (storage layer) had been stored horizontally to the surface (called longitudinal recording), but scientists note that at a certain density, the magnetization repelled each other. From the Gizmodo article:

“Seagate saw longitudinal recording limiting their hard drives to somewhere around 100 gigabits (12.5 gigabytes) per square inch, and at the rate things were going, without perpendicular storage, hard drive makers would be up against a wall. With perpendicular recording, though, they think they can eventually hit somewhere around 1 terabit (about 128 gigabytes) per square inch. Today, in 2010, they're maxing out at about 400 gigabits per square inch in stuff you can buy off the shelf....Seagate's hazy prediction for what this actually means for hard drives: Upwards of 50 terabits (6.25 terabytes) per square inch.”

Apparently at a certain point, the magnetization of the bits on a horizontal layer start to repel each other. If the data is stored perpendicular to the surface, the magnetization wants to be closer together. Storing the data perpendicular to the surface, then, allows a much greater mass of data is a much smaller space.

Solid State Drive

A solid-state drive (SSD) is a data storage device that uses solid-state, or flash memory, to store persistent data. There are no internal moving parts inside the device, so retrieval times tend to be much faster than a traditional hard drive. Flash memory can be found in your computer's BIOS (basic input/output system) chip, digital cameras, portable memory sticks, and video games. The original usage of the term "solid-state" (from solid-state physics) refers to the use of semiconductor devices rather than electron tubes but, in the present context, has been adopted to distinguish solid-state electronics from electromechanical devices. Much of the development has been geared not only to try to lower the per GB cost, but also to create them for use in mobile devices, such as ultra-light laptops and smart telephones.

Optical Media and Holographics

While optical storage devices are familiar, what's going on them may not be. Right now, the data is stored on the surface, in one or two layers. Companies such as GE are working on storing data in multiple holographic layers throughout the entire disc. From the GE Website:

“To read out the data, the original laser beam that had no data in it is bounced off of the stored pattern and recreates the data pattern, which can then be detected with a camera. The key to getting enormous amounts of data stored is that the patterns are very sensitive to things like the angle of the mixing beams. In fact, by adjusting the angle of one of the recording beams, a second pattern can be recorded directly on top of the first, and this process can be repeated as many as 10,000 times. Then we move to a new location on the disc and there might be as many as 1000 locations on the disc. So 1,000,000 bits per hologram, with 10,000 holograms recorded per location, and 1000 locations per disc.”

While this technology may not be commercially available until 2011, GE is working on marketing the technology to companies needing long-term storage solutions, such as medical companies needing access to the records for 70 years.

Cloud Computing

Offsite storage is standard practice, but what if the storage facility burns? What if you had information backed up in multiple buildings that you could retrieve at any given moment? Cloud computing is Internet-based computing, with files and resources on multiple servers. It can be as simple as housing files at a data center, or as complicated as mirrored sites with no down time for the client, even if one of the mirrors fail. The term cloud is a metaphor for the Internet, based on the cloud drawing used in the past to represent the telephone network, and later to depict the Internet in computer network diagrams as an abstraction of the underlying infrastructure it represents. Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) is one of the larger commercial providers. The pricing includes $.15 per GB up to 50 TB. Amazon claims that S3 uses the same scalable storage infrastructure that Amazon.com uses to run its own global e-commerce network. Amazon S3 is reported to store more than 102 billion objects as of March 2010.

For further reading:

• Slashdot. News for nerds. Stuff that matters. Good overview of technical news
• Future of Storage (3/19/2010)
• Solid State Drives in Enterprise Applications (1/29/2010)
• Inside Western Digital: How Tomorrow's Storage Gets Made [magnetic] (2/15/2010)
• Five Dimensional Data Storage [optical] (5/20/2009)
• GE's Breakthrough Can Put 100 DVDs on a Disc (4/26/2009)
• Getting the Most Out of a Disc (2/3/2006)
• Computer Data Storage Through the Ages—From Punch Card to Blu-Ray (3/2/2009)

>"A morsel of genuine history is a thing so rare as to be always valuable." ~Thomas Jefferson (April 13, 1743 – July 4, 1826)