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Digital Storage in Consumer Electronics 2008
Coughlin Associates , Jan 2008, Pages: 149
This report is the seventh report on data storage and emerging applications and the fifth report on data storage and the consumer electronics market. The 2008 report is accompanied by a separate report giving results from a consumer survey conducted in 2007 regarding uses of consumer devices, content storage trends and storage expectations and requirements. The data storage requirements for consumer devices are increasing.
This demand is fuelled by the availability of inexpensive digital storage devices, increasing interface and Internet bandwidth as well as greater processing power in smaller devices. The combination of developments in these technologies is enabling the availability of greater amounts of content and at higher resolutions. It is also enabling the growth of user generated content at higher and higher resolutions.
The development of greater direct attached interface speeds and more sophisticated local and remote digital backup and archiving functions is creating a greater capability to protect and preserve personal and commercial content in the home. In some cases the software and services for remote backup even approach the capabilities of true continuous data protection. This is expected to lead to significant growth in external storage for backup and data protection as well as storage expansion. We believe that applications such as DVR expanders and media servers will create additional demand in external storage by the next decade.
Greater Internet bandwidth available to more people as well as greater storage capacities and widespread content editing is making more user generated content available to closed networks such as family and friends or open networks such as YouTube, Facebook and other popular web sites. This sharing of content creates a significant multiplication in the total digital storage used for a given piece of content. This in turn multiplies total storage demand. Most users rarely clean up their old content and as a consequence barring some accidental deletion they accumulate more and more personal and shared content over time.
The mobile device storage market is favouring flash memory, particularly for lower resolution content since it is possible to buy lower capacities of flash memory for prices less than the cheapest hard disk drive. Flash memory has nearly displaced optical disks for music playout for most younger users. Hard disk drives are favoured for higher resolution media players (especially for video) and higher end camcorders. They might also be required for hypothetical life logs and personal memory assistants. At the same time the bulk of portable media players and lower end camcorders are expected to move to use primarily flash memory.
Hard disk drives are expected to rule the static consumer applications in most homes since they offer significant amounts of digital storage needed for using content intended for larger screens and for maintaining larger content libraries that are downloaded to mobile devices for temporary use. As discussed earlier hard disk drives will be used for backup and storage expansion for static consumer applications. Downloading content from the web will also favour hard disk drives since these devices are usually the final repository for any such content that is retained by the user.
Optical discs are currently struggling to remain competitive for playout of music as well as downloading of various sorts of content. As Internet bandwidths increase and hard disk capacities grow the trend of declining sales of CDs will impact the growth of video discs as well. The format war between Blu-ray and HD DVD will not help optical disks in their struggle against downloaded content.
The best chance for optical distribution to remain competitive is in higher resolution content since downloading such content is difficult except in higher bandwidth households. We expect that in the next ten years content files of several hundred GB or more could be used by consumers for Ultra-HD video or even higher resolution content. This could help defend optical disc use but nevertheless optical disk sales are expected to decline for consumer applications over the next few years.
The bottom line is, we have only seen the beginning of what consumer electronics will do to demand for digital storage. The projections given here may seem aggressive but the authors believe that they may actually be conservative in many areas. We list some key points of the report in the following list.
Key Points
- By 2015 overall consumer content, including commercial, personal as well as shared content could add up to about 760 exabytes worldwide.
- Projections based up on a consumer survey show that we could expect over 2.2 TB of new content in an average home in 2013 including backups.
- By 2013 total content in an average home could total almost 9 TB. 5 TB of this is commercial content.
- Projections for the upper 10% most active users of content in the home could easily see their storage capacity requirements double those of the average user.
- After 2010 Life Logs and other new content capture and sharing technologies could drive the use of storage capacity for user generated content to enormous levels.
- After 2010 mobile computing and consumer applications will dominate HDD unit shipments and sub-3.5 inch form factor drives will be larger than 3.5-inch drive shipments by 2012.
- Most mobile applications will migrate to flash memory except where higher storage capacities are required for mobile library content or higher resolution video is captured (such as in higher resolution, longer use time camcorders). Projected lifelogs and personal memory assistants will also need larger amounts of storage for content capture and storing content proxies and thus will also favour small form factor hard disk drives.
- Hybrid drives could find applications in consumer electronic products that need the storage capacities of a hard disk drive but want to have power usage and ruggedness approaching that of solid state drives.
- Most static consumer applications favour the growth of hard disk drives since higher resolution is required for larger screens and homes are generally where user generated content as well as commercial content libraries are kept. Backup and protection of data will also drive the use of hard disk drives in the home.
- Economic and performance factors favour greater integration of digital consumer application into the storage devices.
- External storage is taking an increasing importance in consumer applications as a way to protect and share content in the home. We project that by 2013 there will be 150 million hard disk drives used in all small external storage devices. This includes direct attached as well as external storage. Many but not all of these devices will be used in the home.
- Optical storage will be defending itself against new content distribution technologies such as downloading and the main defence it has is the support of higher resolution content that makes downloading too onerous.
- Digital storage in the home will become increasingly networked. There will be a growth in personal network storage devices that allow mobile users high performance access to large amounts of data on the go.
- As greater amounts of data are generated and accumulated in the home and as this content is spread between more and more consumer devices there will arise the need for virtualization and other more sophisticated ways to make management of all this content easier.
- Ultimately we believe that there will arise a highly abstracted “home storage utility” that will hide the complexity of storage in consumer devices, handle data transfers and backup and indexes and automatically generates appropriate metadata for that content.
- Total digital storage device capacity for all storage devices shipped into the home could reach 650 exabytes by 2013. At the same time expected accumulated consumer data by 2013 is expected to be about 760 exabytes.
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