Thanks to Moore's Law, the speed of server processors is advancing so fast that they threaten to "“drown" storage systems, which have a While disks are doubling in capacity every 18 months, in accordance with Moore's Law, the cost per capacity is only dropping 30% a year, and speed improvements are not keeping pace with servers, Yoshida said in an interview about storage trends with Network World.

There's still a 10- to 12-year development road map ahead for spinning disk drives, but the technology's inherent limitations will eventually force a shift to something new, Yoshida says.

The spinning disk is "probably the only high technology that's still very mechanical," Yoshida says when asked why cost per capacity is improving slowly. "It has a motor that spins and it has an arm that has to be moved to the right track. There is a limit to how fast we can spin that disk."

have begun using small amounts of flash-based solid state disks to serve applications whose performance needs aren't met by mechanical hard drives. SSD can be anywhere from 10 to 17 times faster than hard drives, while also costing 10 to 20 times more, Yoshida says.