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Terrabit Per-Square-Inch Hard Drive
BitGuy writes: "Physics News Update reports that current GMR (giant magnetoresistance) harddisk technology will not achieve terrabit-per-square-inch densities. Experiments with EMR (extra-ordinary magnetoresistive), which exceeds 100Gb/in^2 have been successful in the lab. There is even a diagram of the read head if you're interested."
Hmm... I wonder how they got dirt and the like to such high density... did they mean Terabit?
-- Huh?
Now all we need is for Palm to get their act together and make those expansion slots support hard drives :-)
-J
"Software is like sex; it's better when it's free." -Linus Torvalds
What a bizarre way to report the story. The news is not that terrabit densities have been achieved; rather, that GMR will not be the technique that will get us there. Hardly news at all.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
OH, you maybe meant "Terabit". As in "a trillion bits". This has been your obligatory spelling flame.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
I'm not buying another one until it comes with Super Duper Magnetoresistance.
"I don't know that atheists should be considered citizens, nor should they be considered patriots." - George Bush
Tera is the SI prefix for trillion (10^12), not terra, which is Latin for earth.
There is nothing to read, and there is nothing to discuss anyway (besides the standard grammatical challenges). The horrible "reporting" (if I may call it that) does not deserve reading, linking or even the IP traffic.
After this amazing news about GMR not supporting Terabit/square inch densities, slashdot reports that pigs *cannot* fly, and bill gates *isnt* poor.
Giant magnetoresistance (GMR) and tunneling magnetoresistance (TMR) hard disk technologies cannot achieve Terrabit per square inch performance. Neither can the "extraordinary" magnetoresistive (EMR) hard disk that is proposed. It is hoped that in the near future "extra-extraordinary" magnetoresistance (EEMR) hard disk technology is developed, and then perhaps "goddamn-extraordinary" magnetoresistance (GDEMR).
"Now gluttony and exploitation serves eight!" - TV's Frank
"Physics News Update reports that current GMR (giant magnetoresistance) harddisk technology will not achieve terrabit-per-square-inch"
Don't worry, 999 Gb will do me fine.
GMR (giant magnetoresistance) harddisk technology will not achieve terrabit-per-square-inch densities. Experiments with EMR (extra-ordinary magnetoresistive), which exceeds 100Gb/in^2 have been successful in the lab.
After that, comes IMR (improbable magnetoresistive) where the Library of Congress fits in a square inch.
Finally, new advancements in subatomic physics leads to LMR (ludicrous magnetoresistive), giving more bits of storage than there are atoms on the platter. The "flavor" and "color" of each quark are directly manipulated and sampled by the drive head.
[
The story is a bit back to front, but not as bad as you suggest
it says:
terrabit densities
Not using EMR
Using EMR
Here's a picture of the read head
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
at first I read that as the "diagram of the red-head"
I recall some things from some years ago where there were even transparent colored cubes that looked like things straight out of Star Trek, but they had problems with the registration. It was next to impossible to reseat the cube exactly correctly so that you could retain access to your data. but obviously, other solutions have worked well.
I would love for the cost of these things to come down to something reasonable for the consumer. Recalling the old Tandy laptops that some folks still use, one of advantadge of them is their virtual indestructability, all because of the solid state memory drives inside. (admitting they are small, but they work very very well indeed)
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Curiously - apart from mass data storage repositories for corporations, does anyone think we'll reach a limit to the amount of data we'll need as individuals?. While we're creeping towards (and will pass) terabyte sized drives and the ability to store every piece of documentation about ourselves, it seems to me (and this may be shortsighted) that all we have left to use is high quality media files relating to our own lives.
How much would you record of yourself, your actions - in sound, video, feelings if you could... and would you edit it down, or keep everything you could.
(pondering, more than posting)
a grrl & her server
Common, when will you FINALLY adopt standards? ;-)
When you finally do, I'll go drink a pint of beer and a eat a pound of cheese at the pub, two yards from here
JB
Dont use the word "inch" around the slashdot crowd.
Yah, sure, terabyte drives are coming... We all know that Maxtor had 120 TB drives back in 1987, but they incrementally release larger disks so as to keep the revenue stream coming. It's a conspiracy!
What this article is saying is that there is a new technology to move to when GMR hits it's limits. 3.5" drives won't stop at 180 GB per platter in 2 years. EMR will pick up where GMR left off and we should be able to see 1 TB per platter before they need to invent the next new technology.
set softtabstop=4 shiftwidth=4 expandtab nocp worlddomination
"Stop this Progress! Stop it, I say!" --the character Theotocopulos in the screenplay of H. G. Wells' Things to Come. And later:
Passworthy: "Oh, God, is there ever to be an age of happiness? Is there never to be any rest?"
Cabal: "Rest enough, for the individual. Too much and too soon and we call it death. But for Man no rest and no ending. He must go on, conquest beyond conquest. First this little planet with its winds and waves. And then all laws of mind and matter that restrain him. Then the planets about him. And at last, out across immensity... to the stars.
And when he has conquered all the deeps of Space and all the mysteries of Time [quietly, broodingly] still, he will be beginning.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
'areal' and 'InSb' are underlined (how twee :)
when you say that you have "capped your karma", what does that mean?
click.
Everything you ever typed or clicked will be sent to Bill and to "Big Brother"
Bill of Rights
b. Sept 28, 1789 d. Oct 26, 2001
Oh, good, that's just what I wanted to make. Let's see... I'll need a hammer, chisel, Bowie knife, file...
Why not create a headline that actually reflects the facts of the topic? /. is pissing me off, once again.
So will this set back in the expected density for hard drives delay the next release of Windoze? I would expect they are going need at least a 1.2TB/sq inch before they will beable to cram the damn thing into a 3.5" form factor.
magnetoresistance
Super magnetoresistance
magnetoresistance 64
GMR Cube
We now return you to your regularly scheduled pedantic flamewar...
It's "terabit".
/. editors? They obviously have some problems sorting out what's important from what's not (I mean... an article about adding a plexiglass logo to your computer case...?), and they also seem unable to spell.
I'm sorry, but what is the role of the
Yes, yes, I've heard it a million times "we're very busy, sometimes errors slip through". Slashdot has maybe 5 or 6 items a day, each about 15 lines long. How hard can it be to actually read those 15 lines before putting them on-line on the main page of one of the most visited sites on the web?
...winchester drives came out, folks were talking about how small the read gaps were and the damage a human hair or a smoke particle could cause if it got between the read head and the platter. Since hard drives were the size of a washing machine, it was pretty amazing to think that a smoke particle could ruin it. Disk drives "fly" the heads as close as they can to the platters to minimize the area being affected by the read/write signaling.
So at what point does the surface of "perfectly clean" material get so inherently bumpy that it's impossible to go any further without crashing into the random atom that sticks above its neighbors? Given the bumpiness induced by thermal agitation, are hard drives of the future going to have to be cooled just to get the heads in close enough?
I am telling you guys, Flux Capacitor is the way to go. It makes...time..travel...possible...
TIM - add TERA to your spellcheck.
This is your second article within the last 2 days where TERA has been made into TERRA. ARgh....
we all know that cold hard drives are happy hard drives (until condensation happens), but I think requiring some sort of strong cooling will be a necessity. The limitations of hard drives will no longer be of just the read/write head.
Rotational speeds and data density will get so high, that the vibration and heat caused by mechanical bearings will not only cause uncontrolled thermal expansion, but also create platter vibration larger (peak-to-peak) than the density of the data itself.
Mechanical bearings will need to be replaced by either compressed-liquid bearings, or isolated magnetic bearings to eliminate the vibration.
It's also unfortunate that the MR heads require a thin cushion of air to ride slightly above the platter's surface. That rules out running the platter inside a strong vacuum, to eliminate air friction (ever had a cdrom spin in a high-speed CD drive for a few minutes, and felt it? that heat is from friction with the air, not from the laser)
I'm surprised these things aren't brought up when advances in disk density is discussed.
I hope they make that 100Tb drive i'll need in five years a fast SOB, otherwise i'll have to wait till I'll be gone for a week or two to reformat it
If you can't see the value in jet powered ants you should turn in your nerd card. - Dunbal (464142)
And I got all excited when I saw that headline! "Finally," I thought, "now there'll be space to store all my pr0n!"
--
Ask the Ya-Hoot Oracle Anything!
for future 3D volume holographic optical
storage nanotechnology.
Unfortunately, the articles doesnt mention that
this 1 terabit/sq.in is 2D AREA technology, i.e.,
your read or write 1 bit at a time !!! 600 mbits/sec ------ SLOOOOOOW !!!!!.
Future Rewritable Volume Holographics can read AND write >>>>> 100 gigabits/sec
1 bit versus billions of bits at one time !!
This GMR technology is stupid and obsolete, is
slow and quite frankly its an insult to have
such primitive technology moving forward. Yuk !
Go to this site for futue store;
http://www.colossalstorage.net
This comes up every time a storage article is posted.
It's shot down every time, but it keeps getting re-posted.
Calculate the cost of the RAM in your computer, per gigabyte. Now, calculate the cost of storage in your hard drive, per gigabyte.
Notice that the difference is several orders of magnitude.
In order for solid state drives to be cheaper than magnetic drives, the cost of pick-your-RAM-flavour has to get a HUNDRED TIMES cheaper, while the cost of hard drives has to NOT get cheaper.
This might happen in the far future if prices drift and keep drifting, but not any time soon.
You can also make a good argument for it being intrinsically cheaper to manufacture hard drive platters than RAM arrays, but this has been beaten to death already.
I'm waiting for LUDICROUS MR!
Pass me those plaid HDD lights for my case....
"I am an Adept of Tantric VAX."
I'm sure people will work out plenty of new ways to waste... uh, I mean use... storage. After all, there was a time the corporations got by on the "huge" 1.5 mb data store. Nowdays we can barely fit a gif in that.
Besides, micro$haft will make sure we use plenty of hard disk space.
"As a writer / novelist you might want to spellcheck your sig.
Ofcourse we'll be able to suck up all that space... we need to have it for all the copies of dvds, cds, and bootlegs that we pirated from the MPAA and RIAA.
:-)
Humorless sig goes here.
This is an old article, but apparently they never got any further on the subject:s 2.html
http://www.sciam.com/askexpert/computers/computer
I suppose that if one can get mirrors to move fast (9ms to be faster than normal harddrives) and accurate, wich is probably just what they already can with normal hardrive heads moving much faster (the average access time from harddisk drives is determined by the speed the disk spins, not the speed of the heads), the only problem left is getting the data-density up..
Not just ordinary anymore! Now packed chock-full of extra-ordinary for more of that generic, everyday experience!
News report summary:
YooR speeling sux. ( What's that earthbit your'e talking about ? )
Article summary:
It isn't, it can't, we wont. ( like.. hot today - rivers can't flow upstream... DUH )
It's kind of scary looking at the thing that in five or ten years we'll be depending on to store our data, and seeing the huge irregularities in its structure. I suppose the stuff inside computers right now is like that too, but it makes you wonder how they get the precision they need, and why those flaws don't make the things break more often than they do.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
I agree that it doesn't flow all that well, and that "the present goal..." should switch with "hard drive...", but it is not backwards in its present form. Yet.
The DOS Guy lurking in the corner
Uh oh, another advancement in disk technology. A little disappointing, I'm still holding out hope for some real progress. Holographic storage, bubblechips or anything not involving more spinning disks or big moving parts that wear out.
... will probably be
IMR = Incredible MagnetoResistance
and then
RMR = Ridiculous MagnetoResistance
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted and ignored otherwise.
Thanks. :)
Interesting and I can't wait to get my hands on an Eval Ultra 320 SCSI drive from Seagate, which is very here and now.
But with all this talk of growing apoferritin and magnetic proteins to get close to the illusive 1TB/inch. I just wonder at what point my hard drives going to get up and walk out my PC.
http://www.nanomagnetics.co.uk Chasing the ACE in the UK for big drives, currently about to demo 8GB/inch a long way off that 1TB mark.
One problem faced by any company in this game is the pace of development and often todays leading technological break through gets leap frogged by abother. Leaving some people seriously out of pocket.
regards, Jon Hutson
How about stupendous magnetoresistance?
Just a thought...
there won't be any complaining that the poll is US-centric:
Bloody-incredible [...]mmmm... I wonder what a quark tastes like...
If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
after Tera comes Peta, Exa, Zetta, and for now Yotta, a good short explanation of all these is at http://www.jamesshuggins.com/h/tek1/prefixes.htm
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
(oops!)
The DOS Guy lurking in the corner