If disk drives were enabled to perform a host of tasks that have traditionally been the work of CPUs, dramatic low-cost improvements could be made in computing environments ranging from laptops to giant storage networks. But this will happen only if computer and drive manufacturers seize the opportunity to update some entrenched standards that currently restrict drives to being relatively dumb devices. So argues Gordon F. Hughes, associate director of the Center for Magnetic Recording Research at the University of California, San Diego, in his summary of the state of affairs in the disk drive storage industry and its potentially significant future advances.
Disk drives' present onboard capacity--32-bit internal microprocessors, several megs of internal RAM and tens of megs of disk space reserved for internal drive use--has already allowed themn to store and serve up blocks of data with such features as advanced error correction. In fact, the drives could take on even more tasks, and the addition of some relatively inexpensive extra processing power would open the door to a huge array of functions, such as data mining and encryption, shifting some of the processing burden from CPUs.
These features will also stimulate innovation and open up new profit centers for drive manufacturers. Their problem at present is that disk drives are becoming a commodity product and hardly exciting to the vast majority of computer users--desktop and laptop owners--who have more than enough storage capacity for their needs.
There is a chicken-and-egg problem, however. Drive manufacturers won't add smart features until computer manufacturers demand them, and computer manufacturers won't build in support for features that don't exist yet. The solution is to make consumers, enterprises and software developers aware of the benefits of smarter disk drives and then demand those features from computer makers. This can be done by encouraging software developers and storage users to get involved with the committees that define the interfaces that connect disk drives and computers.
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