The major components holding back performance are RAM and HD. Accessing RAM, even ultra low latency DDR RAM, causes a massive delay for the CPU.
HD speeds haven't improved as much as CPU speed. HD speeds have remained fairly static over the past few years. There have been small inceremental increases in reading and writing speeds, but access latency has not improved at all. The speed (and accuracy) with which the r/w head(s) in the HD can move has reached a peak.
The only way forward is going to be solid-state storage. Think really big flash-RAM cards. Two major problems need to be resolved before that technology is usable:-
1) Speed. FlashRAM cards (in all their guises) are still nowhere near as fast as HD's for streaming data.
2) Durability. FlashRAM cards wear out. Every time you write to them, it causes wear. Very approximately, after 1000 read/write cycles of a particular area of a card will render it unusable.
If you think how far this technology has moved in the past few years, it seems reasonable to assume that further improvements will be made and we will, one day, be able to consign HD's to be used where tape drives are currently.
HD speeds haven't improved as much as CPU speed. HD speeds have remained fairly static over the past few years. There have been small inceremental increases in reading and writing speeds, but access latency has not improved at all. The speed (and accuracy) with which the r/w head(s) in the HD can move has reached a peak.
The only way forward is going to be solid-state storage. Think really big flash-RAM cards. Two major problems need to be resolved before that technology is usable:-
1) Speed. FlashRAM cards (in all their guises) are still nowhere near as fast as HD's for streaming data.
2) Durability. FlashRAM cards wear out. Every time you write to them, it causes wear. Very approximately, after 1000 read/write cycles of a particular area of a card will render it unusable.
If you think how far this technology has moved in the past few years, it seems reasonable to assume that further improvements will be made and we will, one day, be able to consign HD's to be used where tape drives are currently.