The conclusion of 1995 marked both the 40th birthday of the hard drive and the silver anniversary of the microprocessor. These two technological advances, and their paralleled growth over the years, have made it possible for media storage to transition from live to tape to disk recording, and will probably allow it to move beyond. The factors and the technology that are contributing to the changes in disk drive and storage technologies will be the subject of this chapter, portions of which appeared in the Media Server Technology column in September 1995 and January 1997.

Not too long ago IBM offered a 10 MB drive as an option for its first-generation x86 IBM-PC. Just a few short years ago, during the era when a 180 MB drive was considered impressive, growth in disk drive capacity was only around 30 percent a year. Like so many areas of technology, this growth curve has dramatically changed once again. We recognize that in 1997, a gigabyte (GB) hard drive is considered the low end of the scale.

Recent postulations stated that drive capacity growth would continue at nearly the same pace at which the power of the microprocessor has increased. It appears that Moore's Law can actually be applied to storage devices as well as to silicon compute devices. Given the recent increases in storage size and reductions in cost for magnetic disk drives, some have stated that the new Moore's Law should be changed to 6 months for disk storage...