IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - October 2015 - 130

The Art of Storage

You Can Take It with You
By Tom Coughlin

If you have a lot of videos, music, or
pictures, you will not have room on these
smaller-capacity laptops. You can store
all of this content in the cloud. That may
work for folks who rarely travel or who
can get Internet access whenever they
want it, but storing content in the cloud
will not work for everyone. This lack of
capacity in SSD-based personal computers leads to a need for auxiliary external
storage for solid-state notebooks, tablets,
and even smartphones.

EXTERNAL STORAGE WILL GROW
External HDD USB or Thunderbolt devices exist that can be used for backing up
computers. These can be either 3.5-in or
2.5-in HDD form-factor products. For
home backup, an external backup appliance could have more than one drive to
provide additional data protection and
higher overall storage capacity. In addition

to backup, external storage devices can be
used for extra portable storage instead of,
or in addition to, backup.
Even if the number of internal
HDDs in computers declines, it is likely that this will drive the growth of
external storage devices, many containing hard-disk drives to provide costeffective additional storage. These
external storage devices may use different technologies to connect the computer and the external storage and may
require external- or interface-provided
power or even contain their own power
supply. Figure 1 shows projections for
the growth of HDDs used in external
storage devices.
External portable storage devices will
likely use 2.5-in HDDs or even flash
memory. These devices can either be connected via USB or Thunderbolt to a laptop computer with power often provided

160
Ext. Storage HDD (M Units)

n 2014, laptops shipping with solidstate drives (SSDs) were just over
20% of the total market. There are
projections that this could increase
considerably over the next few years,
possibly reaching over 50% of the market by 2017 [1]. This trend is driven by
the decreasing costs for SSD storage
capacity and the longer battery life that
is possible with SSD laptops. Presently,
SSDs with 256-GB capacity sell for
about US$90. SSDs are still at least
four-times more expensive in US$/GB
than hard-disk drives (HDDs) (a 1-TB
notebook HDD sells for about US$50
while a 1-TB SSD sells for about
US$400) [2]. A 256-GB storage capacity is enough to hold many applications
and two operating systems, with some
room for data storage.
Depending upon the user, 100 GB or
less of user data storage may be enough,
but there are many users who will need
more than this capacity. With the introduction of 3-D flash memory, the price
of flash memory will decline even further, making more affordable highercapacity laptops with SSDs. Even so,
higher-capacity HDDs will also be available (note that Toshiba announced a
1-Tbpsi 2.5-in HDD that could hold
more than 2 TB in a laptop form factor),
and it is not clear that the general price
differential between HDDs and SSDs
will go away any time soon.

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Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MCE.2015.2463414
Date of publication: 29 October 2015

130 IEEE ConsumEr ElECtronICs magazInE

FIGuRE 1. The history and projections for HDDs in external storage devices [3].

october 2015

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - October 2015