Mark Howard Kryder (born October 7, 1943 in Portland,

Oregon Oregon () is a U.S. state, state in the Pacific Northwest region of the Western United States. The Columbia River delineates much of Oregon's northern boundary with Washington (state), Washington, while the Snake River delineates much of it ...

) was Seagate Corp.'s senior vice president of research and chief technology officer. Kryder holds a

Bachelor of Science A Bachelor of Science (BS, BSc, SB, or ScB; from the Latin ') is a bachelor's degree awarded for programs that generally last three to five years. The first university to admit a student to the degree of Bachelor of Science was the University o ...

degree in

electrical engineering Electrical engineering is an engineering discipline concerned with the study, design, and application of equipment, devices, and systems which use electricity, electronics, and electromagnetism. It emerged as an identifiable occupation in the l ...

from

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is conside ...

and a Ph.D. in electrical engineering and physics from the

California Institute of Technology The California Institute of Technology (branded as Caltech or CIT)The university itself only spells its short form as "Caltech"; the institution considers other spellings such a"Cal Tech" and "CalTech" incorrect. The institute is also occasional ...

. Kryder was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 1994 for contributions to the understanding of magnetic domain behavior and for leadership in information storage research. He is known for "Kryder's law", an observation from the mid-2000s about the increasing capacity of magnetic hard drives.

Kryder's law projection

A 2005 ''

Scientific American ''Scientific American'', informally abbreviated ''SciAm'' or sometimes ''SA'', is an American popular science magazine. Many famous scientists, including Albert Einstein and Nikola Tesla, have contributed articles to it. In print since 1845, it ...

'' article, titled "Kryder's Law", described Kryder's observation that magnetic disk areal storage density was then increasing at a rate exceeding

Moore's Law Moore's law is the observation that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit (IC) doubles about every two years. Moore's law is an observation and projection of a historical trend. Rather than a law of physics, it is an empi ...

. The pace was then much faster than the two-year doubling time of semiconductor chip density posited by

Moore's law Moore's law is the observation that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit (IC) doubles about every two years. Moore's law is an observation and projection of a historical trend. Rather than a law of physics, it is an empi ...

. In 2005, commodity drive density of 110 Gbit/in² (170 Mbit/mm²) had been reached, up from 100 Mbit/in² (155 Kbit/mm²) circa 1990. This does ''not''

extrapolate In mathematics, extrapolation is a type of estimation, beyond the original observation range, of the value of a variable on the basis of its relationship with another variable. It is similar to interpolation, which produces estimates between kn ...

back to the initial 2 kilobit/in² (3.1 bit/mm²) drives introduced in 1956, as growth rates surged during the latter 15-year period. In 2009, Kryder projected that if hard drives were to continue to progress at their then-current pace of about 40% per year, then in 2020 a two-platter, 2.5-inch disk drive would store approximately 40

terabyte The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer and for this reason it is the smallest addressable uni ...

s (TB) and cost about $40. The validity of the Kryder's law projection of 2009 was questioned halfway into the forecast period, and some called the actual rate of areal density progress the "Kryder rate". As of 2014, the observed Kryder rate had fallen well short of the 2009 forecast of 40% per year. A single 2.5-inch platter stored around 0.3 terabytes in 2009 and this reached 0.6 terabytes in 2014. The Kryder rate over the five years ending in 2014 was around 15% per year. To reach 20 terabytes by 2020, starting in 2014, would have required an implausibly high Kryder rate of better than 80% per year. By 2019, it was observed that Kryder's law "has proven to be outdated as the cost of media storage is decreasing at a slower pace than in the past and is now stabilising."

Awards and honors

Mark H. Kryder is an elected member of the

National Academy of Engineering The National Academy of Engineering (NAE) is an American nonprofit, non-governmental organization. The National Academy of Engineering is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy of ...

, a

Fellow of the American Physical Society The American Physical Society honors members with the designation ''Fellow'' for having made significant accomplishments to the field of physics Physics is the natural science that studies matter, its fundamental constituents, its mot ...

. and a

Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is a 501(c)(3) professional association for electronic engineering and electrical engineering (and associated disciplines) with its corporate office in New York City and its operation ...

(IEEE). He was Distinguished Lecturer for the IEEE Magnetics Society, and has been awarded the IEEE Magnetics Society Achievement Award and IEEE Reynold B. Johnson Information Storage Systems Award. Kryder received the Pingat Bakti Masyarakat from

Singapore Singapore (), officially the Republic of Singapore, is a sovereign island country and city-state in maritime Southeast Asia. It lies about one degree of latitude () north of the equator, off the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, bor ...

in their 2007 National Day Awards.

References

External links

* * * * {{DEFAULTSORT:Kryder, Mark 1943 births Living people Computer hardware engineers IBM employees Stanford University School of Engineering alumni Members of the United States National Academy of Engineering American chief technology officers California Institute of Technology alumni Fellow Members of the IEEE Fellows of the American Physical Society