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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.
Hell, doesn't everybody have at least 100 gigs of DivX?
Also, we're seeing more people using their computers as Digital Video Recorders. You can never have too much HD space for that.
IBM's major problem was that, although they were able to scale down the GMR head very easily, they had large stocks of old media that was not certified for use on GMR drives. (Incidentally, most of that media is in an enormous warehouse in Hungary, which is where most of their drives are produced now.) They designed a recertification process that was supposed to allow them to separate the media that would be suitable for the 75GXPs from the media that wasn't suitable, but that process was deeply flawed and this resulted in the high failure rates of their drives.
You may find it a bit odd to be hearing this from a former Maxtor employee. Well, the dirty little secret of storage companies is that reverse engineering is rampant. My colleagues at Maxtor probed, disassembled, and tested the IBM drives; indeed, they might have known what the bug was even before IBM did.
So, the obvious RISK of GMR technology is: do not use platters that are not certified for use with the new heads. Those who disregard this creed are certain to meet with a nasty public relations disaster in due time.
freebsd guy
..Of course 640k should be enough for anyone..
This always comes up in discussons about huge hard-drives. I've got a couple of hundred gigs on my desktop, and I'm currently going through and trying to clean the thing up to make some free space. Granted there is a lot of junk there, but I actually need the space for working with video files - I do graphic design and video editing and I can tell you that 100gb sounds great, but can fill up fairly fast when your working with uncompressed files.
air and light and time and space
Back in 1988 when I worked in an IBM mainframe shop, I had the good fortune to run accross one of their "technical newsletters", a publication of data from basic research efforts in various IBM labs around the world.
It's since been my "case in point" in any argument that there is no market for "basic research" and therefore government, taxes, theft, must be used in order to better the human condition.
Fulton, Bell, Edison, Tesla, and a host of for-profit universities all doing basic research not withstanding, some people just love using guns to force others to support their theory of "good".
IBM didn't keep their basic research secret then, and even with something as impossibly profitable as keeping GMR secret now might have been, the article notes that the highest density drive on the market isn't even made by IBM. They're not keeping it secret now, either.
Bravo.
Bob-
The Ludwig von Mises Institute. The reasoning individuals economics
A question: The amount of space users require has increased with the types of files being used (or is it vice versa). EIther way, as we've gone from text files to graphics to audio to video, we've been using more and more space. What comes after video? What's going to be the next disk space hog? (And who's going to be controlling *that* media?)
This is kind of offtopic, but interesting nonetheless. The economist provides that nice little Flash infographic as part of the story, served off their own URL, and it's actually impressively done.
But get to the final step, and you'll see that "this translates into very large capacity hard drives that can be made cheaper and more reliable for our IBM customers." It's marketing fluff for IBM!
It looks like The Economist was happy to be given this material, since it probably looked so snazzy. But I think at best they'll be embarrassed by their lack of (online) journalistic savvy, and at worst it's the start of a new world of checkbook journalism.
Are you scared that there's stuff in your body that all of humanity, in all of history, still hasn't figured out? Empirically trying things and evolving better methods has worked for the past umpteen million years, it's kind of odd to start complaining about it now.
If you want to get rid of the bathwater, you've got to throw out a few babies.
With all this great technology, I wonder why these larger capacties are only available on IDE drives.
It seems to me, SCSI drive capacities used to outstrip IDE by quite a bit, and the price penalty wasn't all that much (~$200). Lately, all I see in the catalogs for SCSI is 18GB or 36GB, while IDE is at 80GB, 120GB, and even 160GB.
Is there something about this technology that isn't compatible with SCSI, or does SCSI not scale well, or what?
In the USA, we like stuff watered down, like beer, television, and freedom.