Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1547041
Demand for low latency local storage, particularly for smaller facilities, remains strong. Network storage will also experience growth, with an increasing amount of this storage being used in private clouds for remote access, as well as studio access. Growth is expected in private and public cloud storage to enable remote video collaboration projects and cloud-based editing. The media & entertainment storage tiers We will focus here on SSDs, HDDs and magnetic tape, although with the activities of several optical storage startups, optical storage could play an increasing role in archival storage by the end of the decade. The pie chart shows our estimates for 2025 of digital storage capacity used in the industry for HDDs, flash (SSDs) and magnetic tape. SSDs SSDs, especially with NVMe interfaces, are increasingly used as primary storage, where data currently being worked on is stored. NVMe SSDs are available from many companies, in- cluding Kioxia, Micron, Sandisk, Samsung, SK Hynix, Seagate and Western Digital. NVMe enabling technology is available from companies such as AMD, Huawei, Intel, Marvell and Nvidia. SSD storage capacities are now available with over 200TB capacities, using quad level cell (QLC) technology, although these will come at considerable cost and are best used in mostly read applications. HDDs With the introduction of Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR), enterprise and data center HDDs with capacities over 30TB are now available, with 100TB HDDs likely by the end of the decade. HAMR and other HDD technologies will continue to drive down the costs of HDD storage, likely faster than those of SSDs, particularly with the high prices for SSDs due to the demand for AI applications. Thus, HDDs should continue to dominate in secondary stor- age for media & entertainment applications where content is not in immediate use and where that content can be moved to SSD primary storage when needed. Magnetic tape Magnetic tape has a long history of use for archival storage, storing data that needs to be kept longer term but doesn't re- quire fast access times. Magnetic tape and optical discs have provided the lowest storage costs, and library systems built with these technologies consume the lowest energy since the data isn't accessed until the media is put into a drive. LTO tape dominates this industry, with current LTO-10 tape providing up to 40TBs of native capacity, and with projections for 100s of TBs of native capacity by the next decade. Magnetic tape is often advertised with 2.5x compression, and with the LTO tape roadmap, tape capacities close to a petabyte, com- pressed, could be available in the next 15 years. Storage for archiving Long-term storage of video content requires inexpensive con- tent storage. However, today archived content is accessed more readily than older passive archives, often offline in cold storage facilities. For this reason, many archives are now "active ar- chives" that provide lower latency archived content access. The ultimate storage for these active archives will be on magnetic tape (mostly LTO), optical discs and hard disk drives. Although there is still a considerable amount of older video content that has not yet been digitized, much of the content that will be digitized has been or will be in the next few years. For this reason, future archive growth will be increasingly driven by archiving of new video content, as shown here in Figure 4. Conclusions Digital Storage feeds every aspect of modern media work- flow. As professional video content size grows to support ever more immersive experiences, so have the requirements for performance, latency and storage capacity. Digital storage and memory vendors are creating new storage products to meet these needs so video professionals have the tools they need to express their visions. The 2026 Report "The 2026 Digital Storage for Media & Entertainment Report," from Coughlin Associates, provides 195 pages of in-depth anal- ysis of the role of digital storage in all aspects of professional media & entertainment. Projections are given out to 2031 for digital storage demand in content capture, post production, content distribution and content archiving, and are presented in 62 tables and 129 figures. You can find out more about the report and order direct at: https://tomcoughlin.com/product/digital-storage-for-me- dia-and-entertainment-report/. Tom Coughlin has spent over 45 years in the data storage indus- try, holding both engineering and senior management positions. Coughlin Associates consults, publishes books and market & technology reports, and puts on digital storage and memory- oriented events. www.postmagazine.com 25 POST SEPT/OCT 2026 Figure 3: 2025 estimates for M&E digital storage capacity for HDDs, SSDs and magnetic tape. Figure 4: Annual storage demand for archiving, digital conversion and preservation.