In the year 2007 the standard desktop PC in shops will have a hard disk drive capacity between 500GB and 600GB, according to Mark Geenen. Mark Geenen is managing director of research company TrendFocus. A 300GB HDD will be normal for a notebook in 2007, and mobile phones and PDAs will have about 20GB.
Optical storage has been around a long time without making any major impact and flash memory is still too expensive, according to Geenen. Other storage technologies are yet to be commercialized -- heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) systems will not be available until 2006 and millipede systems until 2007 or 2008, Geenen said.
The most immediate advance in storage technology is the move to perpendicular storage of data on hard disks, which will begin to appear later this year, Geenen said.
Perpendicular storage is an evolutionary technology which can be produced using existing production lines. It can provide storage capacities of up to 1Tb per square inch, which is equivalent to storing 1TB on a single 3.5-inch disk platter and almost 10 times as much as today's standard longitudinal storage systems.
The disk drive industry will deliver over 300 million hard drives of all kinds in 2004, 16 percent up on the 261 million drives shipped in 2003, Geenen said.
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