A Terabyte of Data on a Laptop Hard Drive

KaosConMan writes: "TechnologyReview.com has an article describing a new technique being developed by General Electric and IBM to further decrease the size needed to magnetically store data. This new technique could produce 150 gigabits per square centimeter-- that's ~57,000 songs on an iPod or a terabyte on a laptop size hard drive!"

Comments

Floating Problems?

[stuffman64]

The first thing that crosses my mind when I see the illustration on the page, is how the heck are they going to be able to keep the head floating just right over the media. Today's drives are nearly perfectly flat to keep an even boundry of air to fly the head. With the pillars dipicted in the illustration, the drive will drag air and create turbulence. Even if the valleys are somehow "filled" in with another material (probably with some sort of plasma vapor depostion process), it is quite possible that the surfaces will not match up quite right. And the filler cannot mess up the magnetic properties of the material, or else this process is nearly pointless.

Unless of course, they just sprinkle some Pixie Dust on it and magically make it work.

Reliability?

[Sheetrock]

As mentioned elsewhere in here, as we pack greater densities into the medium the effect of heat on the data is easier to notice.

However, another concern I have is with magnetics. Larger capacities mean that more magnetic signals are being clustered into smaller spaces, which would seem to make them more prone to distortion by magnetic forces external (the Earth, electric outlets, sunspots) and internal (SDRAM, the laptop monitor, and nearby signals on the drive itself). It's all well and good that the signals can be packed into the drive, but simultaneous advances in read/write head technology and nanoferris combinatorics in the drive wheel need to occur before we can start realizing data densities of the type we'd seriously drool over.

Although, to tell you the truth, I never thought we'd reach a gigabyte in a desktop system either. However, the economic incentives just don't seem to be a driving force in any PC technology development lately, so I'm guessing it will be a while before we can pick this up at Best Buy.

working with 1Tb

[Sarin]

I've made myself a terabyte fileserver a while ago, everything's raid-5 so there's redundant data incase one of the 160gb drives crashes. I wouldn't want to use a single gb drive, imagine yourself collecting a lot of data and then that single drive crashes, all of that work would be for nothing. I got firewire installed on it so the speed is really fast for other computers.
Another thing is you have to be very tidy with your archive, otherwise such a big drive is going to be very messy.

Re:How much capacity is 57,000 songs?

[Jugalator]

Hm...

1 Tb is 10^12 bytes right? Ok, not exactly, but the correct magnitude? :)

1 * 10^12 / 57 * 10^3 = 17,543,859 bytes/song.

So it seems the author is using 17 Mb mp3's or something... Must be one of those "wooo i need l33t 640kbps mp3z cuz 256kbps dont r0x0rz".

Or it's just an approximation. :-)

Removable storage, anyone ?

[billcopc]

I guess this means my shiny new DVD burner is already obsolete. Backing up my desktop to 4.7gb DVD-RW discs was decent, but now if I end up with a TB or two on my raid array, I'll have to find another backup system. And no, tapes don't cut it, nor does carrying an extra pair of hard drives around. Where's that 155tb optical disc we've been hearing about for the last ten years ?