Actually... I've done an extensive study on Moore's law, and a comparison of drive and CPU advances spanning back to 1965 (the year Moore stated "The complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year ..." the commonly misquoted "18 months", which he never said.) This relates specifically to transistors etched on silicon, and was never "meant" to encompass any other area of technology. The CPU comparison I did shows a consistent doubling of CPU transistors every 2 years, as he stated. There have been very little variation in this growth. Storage technology on another hand is a very different matter, and applying "Moore's Law" to that, quickly illustrates that has been shattered in this area of technology. (No reason to believe all technologies would grow at the same rate). There have been factors of 800% growth in storage capacity in as little as 24 months (1989 to 1991 for example where standard HD's available to the consumer jumped from 80mb to 640mb!). It continues to grow. I have made 2 predictions in what this growth will look like for the future. At October of 2007, 3 makers have 1tb 3.5" HD's on the market (SATA). They sell for easily under $500. I have predicted 1pb drive at around 2021, but it's not out of the question to see them by 2017. Fujitsu have pledged to expand drive capacity by 500% in only 2 years. That's a lot bigger factor that doubling in the same span. I also predict that by 2011, there will be no "Hard Disks". At this point SSD (solid state drive, i.e. physical memory) will replace "moving parts" technology entirely, and HD's will go the direction of the punched card. (Really.) Might take another 10 years to get legacy gear out, but all new purchase will be SSD. These drive will be 1000% to 5000% faster than today's HD's. Which, we'll need if we're going to copy Petabytes of data anyway, since at 100mb/sec it would take ~2,700 hours to transfer that amount of info. (Yeah, Petabytes are THAT big). Or to put another way, 115 days, or just a hair over 4 months. Hope you don't need that info any time soon...
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Actually... I've done an extensive study on Moore's law, and a comparison of drive and CPU advances spanning back to 1965 (the year Moore stated "The complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year ..." the commonly misquoted "18 months", which he never said.) This relates specifically to transistors etched on silicon, and was never "meant" to encompass any other area of technology. The CPU comparison I did shows a consistent doubling of CPU transistors every 2 years, as he stated. There have been very little variation in this growth.
Storage technology on another hand is a very different matter, and applying "Moore's Law" to that, quickly illustrates that has been shattered in this area of technology. (No reason to believe all technologies would grow at the same rate). There have been factors of 800% growth in storage capacity in as little as 24 months (1989 to 1991 for example where standard HD's available to the consumer jumped from 80mb to 640mb!). It continues to grow. I have made 2 predictions in what this growth will look like for the future. At October of 2007, 3 makers have 1tb 3.5" HD's on the market (SATA). They sell for easily under $500. I have predicted 1pb drive at around 2021, but it's not out of the question to see them by 2017. Fujitsu have pledged to expand drive capacity by 500% in only 2 years. That's a lot bigger factor that doubling in the same span. I also predict that by 2011, there will be no "Hard Disks". At this point SSD (solid state drive, i.e. physical memory) will replace "moving parts" technology entirely, and HD's will go the direction of the punched card. (Really.) Might take another 10 years to get legacy gear out, but all new purchase will be SSD. These drive will be 1000% to 5000% faster than today's HD's. Which, we'll need if we're going to copy Petabytes of data anyway, since at 100mb/sec it would take ~2,700 hours to transfer that amount of info. (Yeah, Petabytes are THAT big). Or to put another way, 115 days, or just a hair over 4 months. Hope you don't need that info any time soon...
Just some food for thought...
-S