Mark Howard Kryder (born October 7, 1943 in

Portland Portland most commonly refers to: *Portland, Oregon, the most populous city in the U.S. state of Oregon *Portland, Maine, the most populous city in the U.S. state of Maine *Isle of Portland, a tied island in the English Channel Portland may also r ...

Oregon Oregon ( , ) is a U.S. state, state in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States. It is a part of the Western U.S., with the Columbia River delineating much of Oregon's northern boundary with Washington (state), Washington, while t ...

) 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, B.S., B.Sc., SB, or ScB; from the Latin ') is a bachelor's degree that is awarded for programs that generally last three to five years. The first university to admit a student to the degree of Bachelor of Scienc ...

degree in

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

from

Stanford University Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University, is a Private university, private research university in Stanford, California, United States. It was founded in 1885 by railroad magnate Leland Stanford (the eighth ...

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

California Institute of Technology The California Institute of Technology (branded as Caltech) is a private research university in Pasadena, California, United States. The university is responsible for many modern scientific advancements and is among a small group of institutes ...

. 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 scientists, including Albert Einstein and Nikola Tesla, have contributed articles to it, with more than 150 Nobel Pri ...

'' 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 Transistor count, number of transistors in an integrated circuit (IC) doubles about every two years. Moore's law is an observation and Forecasting, projection of a historical trend. Rather than a law of ...

. 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 Transistor count, number of transistors in an integrated circuit (IC) doubles about every two years. Moore's law is an observation and Forecasting, projection of a historical trend. Rather than a law of ...

. 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 know ...

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 un ...

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 organization, nonprofit, NGO, non-governmental organization. It is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM), along with the National Academ ...

, 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. The following lists are divided chronologically by the year of designation. * List of fellows of the ...

. and a

Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers , the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is an American 501(c)(3) public charity professional organization for electrical engineering, electronics engineering, and ot ...

(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 an island country and city-state in Southeast Asia. The country's territory comprises one main island, 63 satellite islands and islets, and one outlying islet. It is about one degree ...

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 Fellows of the IEEE Fellows of the American Physical Society Benjamin Franklin Medal (Franklin Institute) laureates