Welcome to the May eNewsletter from Storage magazine, which includes - among lots of other not-to-be-missed content - a fascinating piece on the future of the hard disk drive. Recent articles in the magazine have included some forward-looking technology pieces on the potential use of glass, graphene and even DNA itself as possible storage media in the future. But, promising as such innovations may be, for most organisations the choice is still what is has been for quite some time now: hard disk, SSD, or tape - and in fact, the reality usually involves some combination of all three.

As Toshiba's Rainer W. Kaese explains in the article: "A few years ago, many analysts and industry spokespeople were predicting that by 2020, spinning disks as storage media would have entirely been replaced by solid state drives. It is now perfectly clear that this simply did not happen. The overall amount of data being generated and subsequently stored has grown so dramatically, beyond all expectations, and consequently, hard disk drives still play a vital role in the global storage business."

The continued growth in data volumes from an ever widening variety of devices (sensors, edge computing, IoT etc.) means that there will still be a requirement for HDD for quite some time to come. Kaese argues that the world's ever-expanding need for greater online storage capacity at a low cost can only be feasibly addressed by HDDs. What do you think? Feel free to share your views via the email address below.

David Tyler, Editor
Storage magazine

To make sure you get your copy of the Newsletter emailed to you personally, every time, click here to register.