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The Story Of GMR Heads
lopati writes "The story of GMR heads, "the breakthrough that boosted the capacity of hard-drives from a few gigabytes to 100 gigabytes and more--came from chance observation, basic research and a vast, painstaking search for the right materials." Check out the helpful infographic." Background: This is a story, essentially, about how hard drives broke through some of the space limitations at the beginning of the 1990s - pretty cool background.
Research really needs to be poured into the development of long-term solid-state storage. Even with GMR heads and modern EPRML magnetic encoding techniques, we are rapidly approaching the limitations of the magnetic medium. New technologies seek to enhance drive speed and capacity at the sake of reliability; I have had four 7200-rpm 100 GB drives fail on me within a year of their purchase. I have had no such trouble with older drives. With RAM and other solid-state getting progressively cheaper and being at absurdly low prices already, it seems foolish to still be reliant on fault-prone mechanical platters for long-term storage.
"The problem with the French is that they don't have a word for 'entrepeneur'." -George W. Bush
We already do.
"If he thinks he can hide and run from the United States and our allies, he's sorely mistaken." Bush on bin Laden
"the breakthrough that boosted the capacity of hard-drives from a few gigabytes to 100 gigabytes and more--came from chance observation, basic research and a vast, painstaking search for the right materials."
;)
In summary, the guys at IBM ran out of HD space for their um, 'special files'?
now THAT'S an idea
:)
/quickly builds a time machine
/takes a 1.6Ghz Althon with 512MB of ram to 1990, installs DOS (5.5 was the top version in '90 right?)
/gives it to a magazine to review, but doesn't give them any clue to the specifications
muhahahaha
I suppose this means that GMR technology is "sufficiently advanced."
I remember first reading about these in some physics articles in about 1991 or 1992; we had a presentation from one of our colleagues on the underlying physics about then. The commercial companies really jumped on it to bring these out so quickly! The only other case I can recall of such quick and major deployment of a basic discovery was when the Erbium-doped fiber amplifiers came out, within a year or so of the discovery of Erbium's ability to amplify optical signals; this is why we can double capacity on optical fibers with ease now, even trans-oceanic cables, just by changing the equipment on the ends, and is one of the major reasons for the rapid increases in bandwidth capacity of the last few years (getting the telco's to actually release that bandwidth for a reasonable price is another story of course...)
Energy: time to change the picture.
Talking about how much modern HD's can hold. . .
The present record holder, a pocket-sized 120 gigabyte hard-drive from
Western Digital, can store the equivalent of a stack of double-spaced
typewritten pages taller than an 18-storey building.
Assume that one story is 10 feet
Assume that 300 pages stack 1" high.
Assume 250 words per typewritten page.
120,000,000,000 / (18 * 10 * 12 * 300 * 250) = ~740 bytes per word!
If an word averages 6 characters, then they are using over 100 bytes to
represent each word!