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Data Storage: Hold That Thought … Literally

At a technology summit in 2006, I had the opportunity to share the stage with Patrick Burns, an official from Seagate. He noted that in the process of writing and reading data his company’s latest HDD disk can spin up to 15,000 rpm and flies just forty atoms above the recording head. Burns went on to share an illuminating analogy to put this feat in some perspective. If the recording head were the size of a 747 jet, he said, the disk would need to be the size of the earth. Therefore, for the jet to perform its job, it would fly less than a centimeter off the ground at 800 times the speed of sound. Moreover, it would need to be capable of counting every blade of grass in an area the size of Ireland, while having an error rate of less than ten blades of grass.

That’s pretty impressive. What’s even more notable is that the next iteration of the data storage technology—because it is experiencing exponential growth—will fly at the analogy-equivalent rate of 1,600 times the speed of sound, fly only half a centimeter off the ground, and be capable of counting every blade of grass in a country twice the size of Ireland with only five errors.

At some point this level of progression will cease. But this time is not on the immediate horizon. Earlier this year, Seagate, Hitachi, and others began selling hard drives capable of storing 1 terabyte of information. (A terabyte, for those with enquiring minds, is an eco-friendly unit of measurement. To store the equivalent amount of information on paper, it would require us to fell 50,000 trees.) By 2010 the industry expects to construct devices capable of storing 300 terabytes--a 300-fold leap--or about the equivalent of storing one year’s worth of data from the Earth Orbiting Satellite system.

The task for the Exponential Executive is begin thinking about the implications of this amazing amount of progress. For example, with that much data storage capability, future-generation recording technology won’t simply be able to record every conversation a person has ever had it will enable that person to record everything that they have ever seen! To this end, it might interest you to know that Microsoft has a research project called MyLifeBits, which is striving to digitally record every aspect of a person’s life. The company is doing this in the expectation that this will soon be an everyday occurrence.

If you want to stay ahead of the curve, you have to learn to “jump the curve” and if you jump the curve with data storage I think you’ll see that there is a world of amazing opportunity out there.

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Jack Uldrich is a writer, futurist, public speaker and host of jumpthecurve.net. He is the author of seven books, including Jump the Curve and The Next Big Thing is Really Small: How Nanotechnology Will Change the Future of Your Business. He is also a frequent speaker on future technology and future trends, nanotechnology, innovation, change management and executive leadership to a variety of businesses, industries and non-profit organizations and trade associations.

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