Angus Kidman18 July 2008, 7:43 AM
Don't let that 16GB iPhone fool you — despite the profusion of flash-based devices Hitachi is predicting that there's at least another decade in hard drive technology.
"We have no concern about the growth of capacities for the next 10 years," senior vice president of Hitachi's IT and telco group Naoya Takahasi said at a press briefing in Tokyo.
Takahasi admits that the rise of consumer electronics has made flash memory look like an increasingly dominant option, with Apple leading the charge. "In the past, the iPod utilised a very small form factor HDD, but today it's flash memory."
But despite the steady rise in flash capacities, Hitachi's internal research suggests that there's no imminent wholesale takeover by flash in sight.
"For the huge capacity requirements like one terabyte or so, it's impossible to cover such an area with semiconductor technologies," Takahasi said.
"For the future, for small capacities, semiconductor-based technology will cover it, but for huge capacity areas, from the viewpoint of bit cost, the hard disk drive is still the major method for capturing such huge data." That situation is unlikely to change for 10 years, Takahasi predicted.
Hitachi hasn't yet announced any plans to match Seagate's 1.5TB forthcoming drive, but was the first to offer 1TB models back in 2007.
Assessing when possible new solutions such as atomic storage will be viable as a replacement for conventional drives is a complex task. "It requires a huge R&D effort," Takahasi said. "It's important to check out which technology is fit for the coming several years."
Reducing the environmental waste from drive production is also an ongoing challenge. Takahasi said that while Hitachi had already complied with EU requirements to minimise hazardous waste, improving manufacturing processes to produce fewer defective units and utilise more efficient factory environments would ultimately be just as important. "That's an area we need to focus: Increasing the level of quality is a big tick item to save energy."
Angus Kidman travelled to Japan as a guest of HDS.