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IBM Increases HD Density with "Pixie Dust"
jeffsenter writes "CNET and the AP have stories on IBM's latest major advance of HD density. "Technically called antiferromagnetically-coupled (AFC) media and informally referred to as "pixie dust" at IBM, the innovation introduces a thin layer of the element ruthenium onto the disks inside hard drives where data is stored."" I knew it. Everyone told me through was no pixie dust in computers - but The Truth shall set you free!
Ruthenium is an extremely rare element, moreso than platinum. It's not valued as expensively as platinum only because it lacks a lot of the useful properties that platinum does have (eg very high melting temperature, chemical resistence), and is usually a byproduct of platinum mining in the first place. I've heard through word of mouth that there is probably no more than ~ 1,000 gallons worth of pure atomic ruthenium known in the world and not currently in use. (Fortunately for us, Ru was considered at one point as a major component in the catalytic converter for cars, but other, more abundent but more expensive materials were found instead.) While each drive that might use Ru in this way would only use a tiny tiny fraction of that 1,000 gallons, a run of drives in the millions could easy make a marked depletion in the supply.
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Found a good page on Ruthenium, for those curious about it's uses, who discovered it, etc. 8-)
And it's only $30/g."I'm nobody suspicious... That makes me sound even more suspicious, doesn't it?" - Spike (Cowboy Bebop)
Given that IBM is a big seller of hard drives with extremely fast interfaces, I'm sure the first drives that use this new coating material technology on the drive platters will be 15,000 RPM drives with LVD Ultra160 SCSI or FibreChannel interfaces and 4-8 MB drive memory buffers. It'll be quite a while before we see this on ATA-100 IDE drives, though.
Raymond in Mountain View, CA
It's not that programmers are getting sloppy, it's that the designers are getting more ambitious.
:-) ). What takes up all the space is all the graphics, sound and fmv. Now that we have large drives, lots of memory and fast processors and graphics cards, the designers and graphic and sound artists can really let themselves go and create visually and aurally rich games.
The core code of most games probably doesn't take up much more than a few megabytes (I'm at work, so I can't check
The reason that games need more and more disk space is that people like me demand ever larger, prettier and better sounding games. It has nothing to do with programmers not bothering to space-optimise their code. (Indeed, you often have a choice between optimising for speed or space usage; given that choice, I know which will be done)
Cheers,
Tim
It's official. Most of you are morons.
The sad part of this new technology is that it's going to allow game programmers to be even more sloppy. Back in my day (I'm not that old) I had a 128mb hard drive. Games had to be small.
What?!? So, back in the day, did your game have full-motion video clips? Support for 1600x1200 resolution? Speech clips? Support for force-feedback joysticks and mice? Oh, it didn't? Gee, I wonder why the game sizes are so much bigger these days. Hmmm. Must be because of those sloppy game programmers.
So help me, if somebody mods that post up as insightful, I'll...I'll...
What's your damage, Heather?
Police arrested Edward Peel at 4:30 PM yesterday for grinding up all the harddrives in the data center where he worked. He was found with a metal grinder, and a bucket of ground harddrive chassis, sitting on top of the largest rack. "But I will be able to fly" he told police before being taken away. The remote backup storage firm that employed him has not been available for comment.
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Of balding Dilbert types in tie-dye suits. Time to up the medication, I guess.
Best Slashdot Co
Oh, about N years.
Best Slashdot Co
I guess that sortof helps. A little.The only clue as to what this stuff does is this tidbit in the AP article:
So, I take it that antiferromagnetically-coupled dust mites increase the blargle factor of a magnetic region? (For some suitable meaning/value of blargle.)
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
I know that Slashdot doesn't employ reporters, like CNN and AP. Nevertheless, in claiming to be "News for Nerds. Stuff that matters", and considering the respect Slashdot has earned as a source of editorialized news filtering, doesn't it seem about time for Slashdot to be a source of direct dissemination of this sort of news concerning technological breakthroughs?
Right now, Slashdot in some ways resembles The Drudge Report. Drudge himself is hardly even a hack in the news space. He is, at best, a right-leaning news filtration system, with a taste for lurid sensationalism (hence his willingness to constantly link to stories which many in the right-wing would call immoral, perverse, and/or otherwise not worth calling news...). He is, at worst, a launderer of political gossip for extreme wings of either political party, most especially the right. (Again, his love of the lurid will often lead him to be used as a tool for spreading gossip for the left-wing, normally against political opponents on the right... But such is the lot of a tool and slave of scandal and gossip.)
Point being: Drudge barely participates in traditional journalism (and thank the heavens for that, considering his absolutely cringe-inducing grandstanding). His existence is truly parasitical. He depends solely on real journalists working for other news organizations, magazines, etc. to create his own brand of "news".
Slashdot differs from Drudge Report in many ways obvious to any reader of this message board. The very fact that there is a "community" component to Slashdot, with peer-review of comments, and further reviews of those reviews, is substantially more engaging to the news reader than Drudge's gossip post. Yet the two news sites share a common trait- namely, that they fashion their own "source" of news that is itself simply a filtered bias towards other news, administered dutifully every day by human decision-makers who understand the values / interests / worldviews of the demographic they are serving.
Now, fast-forward to my point about "Pixie Dust", so I can tie this sprawling mess into one universal point and walk to my fridge and grab myself a Bawls or two...
It seems to me that there would be an incentive for companies like IBM to cultivate a direct relationship with top-tier tech-news outlets like Slashdot, so that they could break news of their own breakthroughs even faster than they currently do. (Just as political operatives have incentives to break news on DrudgeReport, for instant penetration of the radars of the community...) It seems a marginal effort would be required to get releases about such breakthroughs DIRECTLY to slashdot, so that we would be able to see it here FIRST, rather than see it first on CNN, then a couple of other sites, and FINALLY breaking on Slashdot (the "news for nerds, stuff that matters" network) after it is already soon to be pulled from front page rotation on CNN, etc. I'd prefer that my specialized news sources, like Slashdot, were breaking stories about their field of specialty (technogeek news, in this case) rather than rehashing the geek ephemera that generalized news powerhouses like CNN are producing.
I want to see Slashdot evolve so that it doesn't continue to subsist in the purely parasitical manner that Drudge does.
I want to see whatever clout you've created as a news brand parlayed into better access to breaking news, right from the source.
I want to see some evidence that the successes you've had are leading to growth not only in awareness about you but in your power and sophistication as a news site.
Most importantly, after saying all this, please consider my last request as carefully as anything else you've seen in this entreaty, should the fates smile on me and moderate me upward into your scrutiny.
As you grow more and more like a news organization, gaining in power and might, for the love of all that is good to us your readers, please oh please don't put another Jon Katz on your payroll.
That is all.
The monkeys appear to be related to this dust, but the exact nature of the relationship lies just beyond my grasp. Perhaps they have something to do with the genetic experiments conducted by one IBM's former business associates, Germans I believe.
Hopefully these HITS of dust will be available to the mass market soon!
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Today, an entirely solid state computer seems to be still very far in the future. They are even making PCMCIA hard disks for cameras and PDAs, so the trend seems to be moving in the opposite direction.
How about 6197439? Just because they chose not to mention them in a press release doesn't mean they haven't protected their IP.
I've always known they put Magic Blue Smoke into computer components. It's undetectable, but you can definitely prove it's there. When you let the Magic Blue Smoke out of the device, the device doesn't work anymore. This goes for anything that uses electricity. :-)
Don't forget to put a bit bucket under the open cable when you go looking for the token. That way, you can catch any data that falls out, and pour it back in the cable before reattaching it.
At this density and with a molecular weight of 101.07 grams/mole then a 3.5 inch disk 3 atoms thick would require 0.0000552 grams of Ruthenium. IBM could make a million disks for $1700 worth of Ruthenium
And if you really want to dive deep, here's the scary level of detail"> you're looking for...
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The Required posting of theory behind antiferromagnetically-coupled media http://www.aps.org/meet/MAR01/baps/abs/S6820002.ht ml. Interesting Stuff...
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"Peace, love and Linux"
:)
"Our new hard drives have pixie dust in them!"
Whats next? IBM OpenAcidTab 1.0?
Yo, so a few more related IBM links from this late reporter...
1 8_pixie_dust.shtml
0 01/20010202_mram.shtml
IBM Research's announcement w/ a link to the whitepaper on the new tech:
http://www.research.ibm.com/resources/news/200105
IBM Think Research article on Solid-State RAM (eventually storage, too?):
http://www.research.ibm.com/thinkresearch/pages/2
Si.
The only possible use for a drive this big is making illegal copies of DVDs and CDs. IBM should know better.
I am wondering if IBM is also conducting as much research into solid-state storage solutions as they are into disk-based ones. We are eventually going to reach a point where we cannot store any more data per unit area of disk, and we are also going to reach the stage where reading these units of data will be unfeasibly slow using magnetic heads attached to a moving arm. This time is likely to come sooner rather than later, and the problem needs to be addressed. When one has a 500 TB hardrive, but the disk IO is only 500 MBps, it will start to become problematic, and at the moment the fact that a hardrive requires a spinning disk is also limiting computer design in terms of both data buses and case appearance. A laptop must have a certain amount of space for a hardrive (although it is debatable whether solid-state drives would be any smaller, one must assume they would surely become so), and those motors take a lot more power than a solid-state media is likely to consume. So, while advances like pixie-dust are great in the short term, what is being done in the long term to create a fully CMOS-based computer, where the only mechanical movement is the fans?
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