How Data Storage Will Keep Up with Data Demand

As the speed, capacity and availability of flash memory ever increases the use of optical and magnetic storage are slowly becoming more and more lesser present in the computing world. Despite the fact that most computers use a hard disk to hold data, the most popular computing device in the present day, the mobile phone, uses a SD card. The ever developing world of flash memory is meaning that the SSD card based computer are becoming more and more powerful, and as larger companies adopt flash memory devices more and more. SSD's are increasing in sales as HDD's slowly begin to decrease, this is due to the fact SSD's have no moving parts unlike HDD's and therefore are much faster. They also take less energy, less CPU power, backup faster and are more reliable, subsequently meaning they are a much better platform to store data on as the development of them increases.

As more development goes into new ways of storing data that are needed to cope with the ever increasing demand of more storage, new technology such as holographic storage, DNA data storage and quantum data storage are being researched to try and make them more realistic in todays society. DNA data storage is currently unrealistic due to the fact that DNA synthesising is extremely expensive and undeveloped, however as the technology for synthesising is improved everyday DNA might be a perfect way to hold massive amounts of data in a small space, this is because its is extremely dense and has the potential to hold up to about 1 exabyte per cubic millimetre. Furthermore DNA has a half life of up to 500 years which is over 5 times as long as magnetic tape, and if all the data in the world was put onto DNA it could fit into the back of a van. Consequently, this makes DNA a great option for data storage and has already been demonstrated in that scientist have already recorded DNA storage of a picture of their laboratory, a music quartet and all of Shakespeare's sonnets. As development continues on the data storage within DNA it has a high potential as universities research synthesis DNA whilst being backed one of the biggest companies in the world, Microsoft.

Atomic storage is nanotechnology that uses bits and atoms on the individual level. An atom is so small that there might be ten million billion in a single grain of sandtherfore if every atom held a bit of data you would be able to store every single word that was ever written in a 0.10 millimetre wide cubic space. Atomic storage has been demistrated on a disc using silicon atoms however they say that it may yet take decades of work to develop a practical working device that stores bits as single atoms.