ATOM Award of the Month, April 2019

For this month's ATOM AotM, we return to the familiar, but in the process, we want to recognize an ATOM trend that has not gotten as much credit as it has deserved.  

We all know what Moore's Law is, and what has been enabled by it.  But what has always been amazing to me is how little recognition a similar law has received.  Storage capacity has risen at a rate equal to (or slightly higher than) Moore's Law.  It is not a technological byproduct of Moore's Law, as it has always been worked on by different people in different companies with different technical talents.  

If storage capacity were not improving at the same rate as Moore's Law, most computer-type products would not have continued to produce decades of viable new iterations.  From PCs to Smartphones to Video Game consoles, all have a storage requirement that has to match up to the size and number of files downloaded and processed.  Correspondingly, data transfer speeds have also had to rise (USB 1.0 to 2.0 to 3.0, Ethernet to Fast Ethernet to Gigabit Ethernet, etc.).  A 2019-era PC could not have a 2006-era hard drive and be very useful.  

Like Moore's Law, the exponential doubling has spanned a sequence of technologies that all sustain the underlying megatrend, from internal spinning hard drives, to flash storage, to storage in the cloud.  Greater density has been matched by shrinking weight per unit storage and less power consumption.  This also means that has computing decouples from Moore's Law and moves into different (and probably faster) forms of exponential growth, storage will almost certainly also follow suit.  DNA-based storage is a prospective technology that has many attributes comparable to expected future computing technologies such as Quantum Computing.  

Unlike Moore's Law, storage has not always advanced at a steady rate.  There are times when it advanced much faster than Moore's Law, and times when it advanced much slower (such as in recent years).  The 40-year average, however, does appear to match Moore's Law's doubling rate rather closely, and hence what one dollar purchases today is the same as what one billion dollars could purchase then, which itself would have been the size of a house.  

Also unlike Moore's Law, there is not a universally-accepted name associated with this trend.  Mark Kryder is sometimes given this attribute, but he did not put forth a prediction early enough for it to be a prediction by any measure (Kryder officially spoke of this in 2005 whereas Moore made his prediction in 1965), his name is not mentioned in any of Ray Kurzweil's writings or other publications, and since he was not the founder of a major storage company, he is not analogous to Gordon Moore.  

As rising storage efficiency is crucial towards the productization of any other form of computing product (including Smartphones), it deserves recognition for its contribution to the technological age, despite often being overlooked in favor of Moore's Law.  

 

Related ATOM Chapters :

3.  Technological Disruption is Pervasive and Deepening