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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?
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
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
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.
[
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
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!
...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?
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!
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."
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.
As near as I can tell from the article, GMR technology was expected to scale to Tb/in^2 densities, but this guy A) thinks that magnetic noise will prevent that density from being achieved, and B) has a (as far as I know) new idea for a technology that is not succeptible to the same type of noise.
For anyone who cares about things other than where they keep their pr0n and if they will have a fast enough GPU to run Quake n, this is potentially very interesting. I wish more news was like this, and less "Foo Bar Inc. has just released a new 23 terawhoosit widget, brining unprecedented levels of frobing to a consumer device" which should properly be called a press release, not news.
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
... 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.
like chicken.