Year in review: storage highs and lows

January

• 1 Terabyte ULLtra DIMMs - flash for capacity with high performance - debuted on some IBM servers. Think terabyte main memory capacity with low latency and high bandwidth.
• 4k video was everywhere at CES. Massive implications for storage if consumers adopt it.
• Backblaze released drive reliability results, showing Hitachi - now WD's HGST group - to be the most reliable.

February

• Researchers in the US and Russia debut Magnonic Holographic Memory, a subset of spintronics. Very early research stage, but promising.
• Micron showed a prototype an RRAM SSD.
• The annual Usenix File and Storage Technology (FAST) conference had some of the best work I've seen in years.
• A 5TB desktop drive was introduced.

March

• A new 15,000 RPM disk drive was introduced. I asked why.
• Samsung announced that Dell is offering the first Non-Volatile Memory express (NVMe) PCIe SSD. It won't be the last.
• Seagate bought Xyratex, the premier supplier of enterprise-class storage enclosures.

April

• A Harris poll found that 47 percent of Americans have changed their online habits since the Snowden revelations.
• Thunderbolt 2 very popular at NAB, the pro video conference.
• Toshiba announced 15nm NAND flashwith 128Gb chips.
• Seagate announced a 6TB drive.

May

• Sony demo'd 185TB tape. Then Fuji/IBM showed a 154TB proto to stress that, yes, tape lives!
• The Library of Congress tested CDs for data loss and the news was not good.
• IBM stopped selling NetApp gear.

June

• Comparing how America treats a real traitor, Jefferson Davis, with whistle-blower Edward Snowden.
• SoSecure launched a Kickstarter campaign for a secure SSD that Apple should have designed.
• Death by petabyte: most SSDs far exceeded their claimed write life.

July

• Researchon why Facebook's popularity will decline, like so many before it
• Shingled magnetic recording (SMR) is the next big thing in disks.
• Not all SSDs are power efficient. Oops!

August

• One feature the iWatch has to have.
• USB condoms: wrap those rascals!
• Seagate announces an 8TB disk.

September

• Are you on top of Social Media data? You'd better be, because. . . .
• Apple dropped the price on iOS device storage.
• HGST goes all in on SMR drives.

October

• A shadow computer industry has grown up with little notice because it doesn't issue press releases or data sheets.
• "Free" cloud storage isn't really free.

November

• Is the post-PC PC a Mac? Why Mac sales and share are climbing.
• Yes, you'll see a $25 TB this holiday. And I did, but it looks like strong sales have pushed it out a month.

December

• Two potential flash replacements, Crossbar's RRAM and Everspin's MRAM, made real progress towards general availability this month.
• And the vinyl LP is staging a comebackwith sales up 49 percent this year!

The Storage Bits take

Storage innovation is alive and well - and accelerating. Amazon Web Services, the leading cloud provider, is growing rapidly and offering hundreds of new features each year, many storage related. Microsoft and Google don't want to be left out either.

Basic research is continuing to find new ways to store data more efficiently and safely. New software companies are offering exciting options for massive storage. And the drive vendors are back on the capacity growth track they fell off 5 years ago.

All this progress is overdue, because a digital society needs reliable, long-term digital storage. That's what we don't have now. Maybe in the next 10 years.

Comments welcome, as always. What was your favorite storage advance of the year?