At first, there were the punching cards, which could only record a few words. Now we are using holographic versatile discs and external hard drives with terra capacities. We had difficulties into imagining all these. Therefore, it looks impossible to imagine what is going to come. What do manufacturers have in mind nowadays? How is it going to look the storage room’s future? We might not know for sure, but we have received some hints…

The smaller, the better
This is something we have known for quite a while. IT developers have continuously competed to create the smallest devices possible. So what else can be done in this direction? Let’s take a CD for example. CDs have small bumps on them, represented by 1s and 0s, and that reflect or deflect a laser light. The intention is to make every single bump store even more data according with the light’s angle. The ideal would be about reaching the scale that sits on the base of the human body construction.

New structure
We can say that most of the present storage means have a specific internal structure regarding the way that data are stored. CDs and DVDs use a spiral pattern and the rest of devices the long line track. It means they are one-dimensional. Nevertheless, some flash memory types use two – dimensional surfaces and there are just projects regarding three – dimensional devices. So here is another thing we can say – holographic storage will rule the future. How soon, it is hard to appreciate.

Nanoscale
A nanoscale technology will allow storage devices to manipulate specific molecules, as they were bits of data. Obviously, all these could only happen on nanoscale, but it will double the storage capacity because a single hole can be once written as 1 and the second time popped out to represent the opposite value, 0. There is no point to stress what a great impact would this technology have in the field.

Measuring units
Coming up with more generous storage means is not enough. New measurement units are necessary. We got used with Terabytes, one terra being the equivalent of 1024 Gigabytes. But we need more. And we might get to use other terms in the near future, like exabytes, petabytes and even zettabytes or yottabytes.

Materials
Storage devices that we nowadays use are built by inorganic materials, because this option costs less. However, chances are for the organic materials to be preferred in the near feature because they are more flexible and make possible for the magnetic information to be kept longer. By longer I mean a million times longer. All the attention is directed on hard drives and their read – heads. Producers think of using some special elementary particles acting like little magnets, for measuring the magnetic field. Spintronic devices are a new invention of the classic spinvalves, which should improve the reading mechanisms.

Management trends
It does not have to be everything about technology. Manufacturers are also going to make some changes regarding the management as well. This is somehow imposed by the federal regulations, that require for corporations to keep the track of enormous amount of information, in comparison with the old protocols. And because more and more public services are looking to switch on electronic transactions, affordable means of saving and retrieving huge amounts of data, increasing the speed access is a new concern. Nevertheless, this last demand will be served by SATA, the follower of ATA technology.