Storage makers near limits?

In prologue to a conference this month on the future of computing, designers are examining physical limits that threaten to halt the rate of improvement in conventional hard drive technologies that we have become accustomed to. The cost-per-megaByte-stored has been falling by a factor of two per year, but it cannot continue indefinitely because thermal and magnetic problems increase out of proportion to the gains brought about by smaller bit sizes. As optical read/write drives are inferior in many ways to magnetic storage, researchers are examining holographic storage, perpendicular recording and atomic probe storage.

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