Using A Microscope As A Hard Drive

An unnamed correspondent writes: "Nature reports that IBM Zurich is developing a practical method for braille hard disks that may eventually be able to pack 60Gbits per square inch, or about four times current disk technologies. I wonder how many moving parts there are with 1024 read heads." Well, they're not really braille; perhaps the analogy to clay tablets made in the article is closer.

Comments

again?

[HiNote]

hello? anybody there? anybody read /.?"

Sumerians developed this years ago.

[Anonymous Coward]

The Sumerians developed cuniform hard drives in 5000 B.C. Not only were these portable (literally fit in the palm of the hand), but they could be read very well from many different angles. There was one write head (known as a "stylus"). Since some of these drives are still readable, they also hold the world record as the oldest surviving portable data storage system.

Will journalists ever learn?

[bboy_doodles]

The information storage capacity of magnetic hard drives has expanded enormously in recent years, but is now nearing saturation point.

Not again! People have constantly been predicting that hard drives and processors would reach a limit in "a year or two", but has it ever happened? No!

In almost all situations, technologies do not just die but gradually evolve and lose the theoretical constraints that everyone was worried about. CDs have grown from storing 600 MB to 4 GB and soon 120 gigabytes.

And on a side note, doesn't this technology seem a lot like CD's? I'd much rather invest in the 120 GB multi-level CDs rather than this "microscopic Braille".

- BBoy doodles
C is for Cookie

Too Many Moving Parts?

[LHOOQtius_ov_Borg]

It sounds, at this point, like the system will be somewhat fragile with so many heads and the notion of a third meaningful dimension in R/W. While at this point it seems too fragile for home use, clever shock-proofing and very good quality control in parts manufacturing could result in a reliable drive. In general, though, it's pretty cool. Unfortunately, the productization of this technology seems at least 5 years off, which means I'll have to stick with a pile of IBM 75GB drives for my (personal, sorry) MP3 server.

On a related note, has anyone else noticed that the claims of IBM's death were a bit premature? They seem to really have re-emerged as a major leader in R&D, and are piling up market leadership points in hard drives and Java tech while making inroads into monitors, back into PCs, and regaining ground lost to Sun, Intel, SGI, and DEC in the big-iron and supercomputing markets. Does anyone know of any really good insights into this in the form of articles, books, etc?

Conflicting statement about performance

[Jeffrey Baker]

In this month's Communications of the ACM, an article by Carnegie Mellon University researchers describes a device of this type which outperforms existing disk technology using an array of only 20 sensor tips. No such device has yet been built.

The article is available from the ACM in PDF format. A paid membership, or a small one-time fee, is required.

Re:it doesn't really matter

[atrowe]

"what good is space, space, and more space when bus speeds are still 133MHz or 266MHz"

File Servers

Large Databases

MP3 storage

Digital video editing

Slashdot's Archives.

There are quite a few applications where massive amounts of storage can outweigh the need for speed. If necessity mandates speed and massive storage, buy several Braille drives and set them up in a RAID 0 config.