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Seagate Overcomes Superparamagnetic Limit
Longinus writes "Yahoo! News is reporting that hard drive manufacturer Seagate has "overcome a significant challenge in magnetic memory with a new technology capable of achieving far beyond today's storage densities -- up to as great as 50 terabits per square inch. Currently, the highest storage densities hover around 50 gigabits per square inch, but Seagate said its heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology could break through the so-called superparamagnetic limit -- a memory boundary based on data bits so small they become magnetically unstable." Perhaps the near future of storage technology lies, for now, not in nanotech or holography, but still in magnetic recording."
Room for more pr0n and mp3.
Ughh I mean serious business applications
We had to destroy the sig to save the sig.
time to start counting how many "more pr0n and [mp3|ogg]"
My porn collection salutes your hard research.
True, Moore's law was directed towards processing power, but the same concept generally holds true for most PC technology.
The bigger or faster the (insert random PC component here), the cheaper the stuff I *really need* becomes.
My wife thanks these researchers for eventually making hard drives that much cheaper!
Don't believe anything I say. I crash test crack pipes for a living.
I'm sure we will have lots of fun figuring out how to backup our users personal hard drives full of pr0n and muzak.
Scratches head comtemplating this not so inSIGnificant endeavour.
"A different technology, under development at the University at Buffalo in New York, promises to provide a nanoscale sensor capable of reading ever-smaller bits of data. The sensor could result in DVD movie storage on small devices or even a supercomputer the size of a wristwatch, UB officials told NewsFactor."
Somebody please explain to me how nanoscalar sensors in storage devices will result in a wristwatch sized 'supercomputer'? Wristwatch mounted storage might be nice, though...
I wonder how much longer they can increase the storage capacity for them lil' buggers. I seem to recall a Scientific American article on the subject, which came to the conclusion that we are likely nearing the limit of the technology.
everyone keep in mind that this says bits, not bytes, i freaked out when i read this, current storage only holds 50 gigawhats?!?! per square inch, and here i am w/ my tiny 160gig drive...
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
The need for higher storage density -- the number of data bits stored on a disk surface -- already has been addressed with smaller bits, but these data chunks are becoming so small that they will be magnetically unstable within the next five to 10 years, researchers said.
This is the real reason hard drive warranties have been getting shorter.
does this mean that it needs to be VERY hot in order to operate, and the outside will be cooled, or are the harddrives going to be external...or even better: am i completely missing the point?
BSD is for people who love UNIX. Linux is for those who hate Microsoft.
Last time I checked Windows came on one CD and many Linux distros require multiple CDs to install. Not to mention the fact that DVDs and hard disks store, read, and write data just a tad bit differently from each other.
Hmmm...2 out of 10 for humor. You DO know that Windows comes on a single CD-ROM? Now if you had picked on Visual Studio....
When their stranglehold on an industry is on the line, some companies are able to overcome the laws of physics.
The gap between the price/size ratio of harddisks and that of backup media/drives is becoming ever wider. It's getting almost exponentially more expensive to back up all of your data, Moore doesn't apply to tape backup I guess. What we need is a reliable, fast and cheap system to back up those 200+GB disk arrays without fuss and preferably on a single piece of media. ADR seems nice, but in my experience the reliability is sloppy.. Other alternatives are WAY too expensive compared to how cheap it is to build huge disk arrays.
Learn from the mistakes of others. There isn't enough time to make them all yourself.
Reminds me of the old time ST-238s (ST-238 = ST-220 (20Mb) + RLL encoding)... And to think that now I have more memory on my PDA than that...
maybe computers will be fast enough to run mozilla one day! Mozilla in itself is not slow. Its your reflexes which make is _seem_ slow.
during a code review, that using 32-bit integers to store the number of sectors on the hard disk would be fine.
Perhaps I should revisit that piece of code....
Yeah, but what is the current progress on the solid state memory devices? I know that there is a Cambridge university team who have got their own division working on this.
If I remember rightly (this info I read about 3 years ago) they said that they had some HDD manufacturers (probably IBM at the time) were very interested in the tech, and their initial projections were about 2.2TB for a credit card sized module. Although they were still early in research/development, I wonder how they (or any others) are doing now?
Are you local? There's nothing for you here!
Come on now, I mean XP is still only 1 disc. My box set of RH 7.0 was like 7 or 8 CDs. Even the download editions of many distros are 2 or 3 discs.
I'm no MS lover (writing this on a Mandrake 8.2 box), but please bash only when bashing is due.
Geek used to be a four letter word. Now it's a six-figure one.
Its always the same thing...first they say that they've found a theoretical limit for a particular technology, so everybody should start looking for new technologies for a particular purpose.
But then they come back and say "Oh wait, we can do this little trick, and then we can use this technology for much longer: we no longer have this particular theoretical limit."
It was true for processors (they're still focusing on silicon semiconductors), it was true for modems (they thought we couldn't go past 28.8, then 33.3, and then 56k...) and now for storage.
I'm not complaining, it's all cool!
Maan
but Seagate said its heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology could break through the so-called superparamagnetic limit
HAMR, break through, hammer.. break stuff.. with a hammer.. get it? ugh.. I should get out more
I think I just had too many BSOD at all the worst possible times today to care. So I feel that a microsoft is the perfect target of satire here.
Love and hate are different sides of the same coin. In fourteen words or less describe the relationships of Linux to UNIX and BSD to Microsoft?
Hey, you put the stake in the ground, why stop there?
Hmmm...2 out of 10 for humor. You DO know that Windows comes on a single CD-ROM? Now if you had picked on Visual Studio.... then it wouldn't have been funny. Duh. VS.NET comes on a single DVD, if you don't count the whole library of developer tools and other junk. On a flipside Windows image installers get ridiculously big with every other release. It's packed with all kinds of crap you will never use, and it's just getting bigger and bigger. There is no reason to have an OS which surpasses the 700MB mark. And before you reply with some ridiculous comment like "OMG SLACKWARE COMES IN 2 CDS PACKED WITH CRAP", it's still not that bad, because you can ignore it and move on to other distributuion, or just install whatever you need. Not sit there and be forced to clutter your hard drive with "hello-kitty OMG look so pretty junk themes" (WinXP).
whats different with this than the "magnito optical" (or similar) that i've heard about years ago? It basically used a laser to heat up hte individual bits so the magnetic head could read/write there, allowing much more bits/sq inch without shrinking hte head any smaller than it already is.
This is not the greatest sig in the world, no. This is just a tribute.
There's no question that being able to jump from giga- to tera- orders of storage/sq. in. is a Good Thing, but I have to wonder how delicate these drives are going to be. Typically, lasers need to be focused pretty accurately to be, uhm, accurate. Methinks that widescale rollout of these drives will be delayed considerably as they figure out ways of ensuring that the focus (mirror-based?) remains unaffected by the typical knocks 'n shocks that are so much the norm, especially in mobile computing.
As was mentioned in an earlier post, solid-state storage has such a great advantage due to the lack of moving parts. The hurdle to overcome there, however, is how to get the same storage density out of a solid-state device. There's always a catch.
speaking of bits being magnetically unstable, this reminds me a bit of DRAM and, if you want to get older, mercury delay lines.
Not sure if current HDs have to continually refresh their data, but it seems that they might have to do that in the future. It would be a challenge to do with huge drive sizes though, because the drive controller would probably be the component in charge of the refreshes. However, if the data retention limits really were still measured in years (albiet small numbers), it might still have a chance without impacting performance too much.
Superparamagnetism...expialidocious!
This isn't reporting, it's reprinting a press release verbatim. Jebus. Here's the original, from Seagate's site.
My deviantArt site
Rightfully so. RH is the Microsoft of Linux distros. They _THE ENEMY WITHIN_
I was just thinking that heat was what computers could use more of these days...
What happens when you turn it off? Will it get all corrupted? Or how about if you transfered the drive to a different system?
There's probably some way around that though (hopefully; this sounds more likely to work than other alternatives)
paul
Yeah, the distrbution gets a bit bigger when you provide the source code.
"I'm afraid I can't comment on the name Rain God at this present time, and we are calling him an example of a Spontaneous ParaCausal Meteorological Phenomenon."
... er `Supernormal ...' - not paranormal or supernatural because you think you know what those mean now, no, a `Supernormal Incremental Precipitation Inducer'. We'll probably want to shove a `Quasi' in there somewhere to protect ourselves. Rain God! Huh, never heard such nonsense in my life. Admittedly, you wouldn't catch me going on holiday with him. "
"Can you tell us what that means?"
"I'm not altogether sure. Let's be straight here. If we find something we can't understand we like to call it something you can't understand, or indeed pronounce. I mean if we just let you go around calling him a Rain God, then that suggests that you know something we don't, and I'm afraid we couldn't have that.
No, first we have to call it something which says it's ours, not yours, then we set about finding some way of proving it's not what you said it is, but something we say it is.
And if it turns out that you're right, you'll still be wrong, because we will simply call him a
"Thanks, that'll be all for now, other than to say `Hi!' to Wonko if he's watching."
I guess this means my computer will eventually do double duty as a space heater.
(I don't remember in which story this was - it was about a civilization whose collapse was traced to the failure of a single database index)...
why larger disks?
what about making drives 100 times faster?
Hmph. Forgot to include the credits. Most people will recognise it as Douglas Adams, anyway. From So Long, and Thanks For All the Fish
Moore's law has been exceeded in several tech areas, for a while now.
DRAM is one of those, but the pace is comming back down due to the lack of demand, hence $$, hence research. and ultimately since they are silicon-based.
Flash is another that's been doubling every... i dunno, 8 monthes?
magnetic storage (hard disks) has been working at ~2x moore's law for several years now. it's really not even a good thing anymore because the supply WAY exceeds demand, and several companies are getting out of the business (say, IBM).
there was another sector that was doing the "exceed moore's law" thing but i can't remember right off my head.
My life in the land of the rising sun.
A 40GB/platter drive (4 platters = 160GB) has a density of 80 gigabits/inch.
So, @ 50 terabits/inch, you could have ~25TB/platter hard drives, or about 100TB in the same form factor as the current maxtors.
G'damn.
-asparagus
Moore's Law only states that the density of switching elements (transistors) on a silicon substrate will double about every 18 months. Moore's Law emphatically does NOT state that computing power will double every 18 months.
:)
Recap:
Computing Power != Transistor Density
Just a quick clarification.
many linux distros only require one cd to install, the other cds are all the added bonus material, that you dont get on a windoze install cd.
50 terabytes per sq. in. 'ought to be enough for anybody!
Think nothing is impossible? Try slamming a revolving door.
This is great and all, but I wonder how important it will turn out being. After all, who the hell buys Seagate drives? I mean besides people like eMachines and Compaq?
Damn, in all seriousness, the most suprising thing about this is that it's not IBM.
You know that is apples and oranges. Linux distributions come with far more software than Windows.
-Kevin
There are a few fundamental differences between a one CD Windows package and a multi-cd Linux distribution. First of all (as a few other posters have pointed out) Windows contains just the OS, with a few minimally useful "accessories", while Linux distributions include boatloads of applications (my Mandrake 8.1 3-disk set included something like 3 or 4 icq clients, for goodness sake). Also, unlike Windows, Linux distributions often include source code as well, and that takes up space too.
And yeah, I know I'm off-topic. . .
So at 50Tbit/in^2 that means that a 3.5" drive with 4 double sided platters might hold
.5" hole)
:)
Area of disk (considering
9.62 - 0.196 = 9.424 in^2
8 Data surfaces
8 * 9.424 =~ 75 in^2
Total data storage:
75 * 50 / 8 = 471 Terabytes!
471 TB = 517869976682496 bytes
Bits needed to address this number of bytes:
ceil (ln (517869976682496) / ln (2)) = 49
And thankfully so long as we have a 64 bit architecture then reiserfs will happily work
I still have 5 1/4 floppys that were formated in 1982 that work on an old Apple ][ but I am sure they can't last another 5 years in storage. Are we just in a constant race against the degrading of our storage medium? Constantly pushing data from one standard to another? Paper seems to be a hell of a lot better long term storage medium than magnetic media.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
Well having a 100TB drive might sound lovely, but if our movies are still going to be limited to DVD size (or the future of DVD sizes? Lets say 100GB) it's not going to offer any great improvements in this area..
I don't know much about this field but "heat-assisted magnetic recording" doesn't sound like it's going to be easily transformed into protable media..
Then the other question is: Backups.. When I have 100TB of data on my HDD, what will I use to back it up? That's one long tape I'm going to need! (I know there are tape solutions for large quantities of data like this at the moment, but they are not *small* and inexpensive compared to say 100GB backups..)
According to legend, Longinus was the Roman soldier who pierced the side of Christ with a spear. That spear was for a long time believed to have a role in controlling the destiny of the world. Adolf Hitler spent years and millions of deutschmarks searching for the Spear of Longinus. It's no coincidence that Longinus himself posted this story. The Spear of Longinus was said during the Middle Ages to "havve propertyies of needed to peerce the superparamagnetism barrier," (according to Nostradamus) which will bring on the end times.
don't forget that RedSplat bundles everything possible, while MS releases only the os and a couple of utility apps, still, in order to get a system equal to Win32 Linux has to be on 2 CDs
This is WAY off-topic, but calling ANY linux distro maker an enemy will not help the linux cause 1 bit. I'm sure MS is banking on infighting like this to disrupt the linux movement much like early unix fragmentation helped other vendors way back when.
Geek used to be a four letter word. Now it's a six-figure one.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Anyone who doesn't recognize where it's from should be shot, anyways. ;-)
well, i'm relieved... I was getting pretty worried about that superparamagnetic limit.
erm.. yeah.
"a quote" -me
Pretend this is from Seagate:
Since 939 of the 1000 random people we surveyed did not know what a terabit was, we will be using the measure of mp3s per square inch when we release our newest hard drive. If AMD can make their own metric, then by God we can to.
(Weeks later a class action lawsuit is filed against Maxtor, Toshiba, et al for continuing to label their new products with the confusing terms Gigabyte and Terabyte, which no normal person really understands anyway.)
Supposing one had a gigabit bus/network, it still will require around 8000 seconds (2-1/4 hrs) to tranmit a terabyte of data. So if there is a thousand fold increase in disk size and my 80 gig drive changes to an 80 tera drive, backups would take weeks.
Well I want my data stored on something not magnetic because when the magnetic poles decrease I want my data to be safe.
I can't help but think that maybe this is a bad hack, like maybe it's possible that it's great science and great technology but... maybe as well it's time to abandon magnetic media in general.
Like every time a new Pentium comes out... everyone cries, "It's just a sooper-dooper overclocked 8086! With a couple new instructions!".
I wonder if continuing to improve on existing technology, and not trying to move in completely new ones, is the best idea.
ZOMG I WOULD LOVE TO KNOW ABOUT YOUR FEELINGS ON MACINTOSH VERSUS WINDOWS, VI VERSUS EMACS, AND HOW YOU'RE NOT A DORK
attractive!
Liquid Metal is. You've got your LM Cube, which is more powerful than any Processor to date. Your LM Memory Strips which is faster (speed of light, theoretically) than any possible silicon-based memory, and LM Sphere Storage faster and more condensed than any magnetic technologies. Liquid Metal is the wave of the future.
If you say so, Fenchurch!
Imagine: a hard drive in my wrist watch.
... it will be able to ... record every time it's ever told AND the precise time at which it told it.
So
I can't wait.
On a side note, in 1991 I bought a 40 megabyte hard drive because it was affordable (~$100). Now in 2002 I just bought an 80 Gigabyte hard drive for about $100. That's a factor of 2000 increase in storage power -> 2^11.
Now 11 * 18 months = 17 years. 1991 + 17 years = 2008! We're way ahead of schedule! Unlesss you revise Moore's law for storage and say that it doubles every 12 months, then the fit is almost perfect.
So if you compare these, each year it takes your $100 CPU longer and longer to process everything on your $100 hard drive. Eventually, hard drives will be so large that they contain more data that your CPU can process!
Just a diversion.
Muerte
Not storage media.
it relates to component density, and was simply an observed trend by Moore.
I'm just saying what I've experienced.
Scientific American had a feature article a while back that explained the superparamagnetic effect, as well as the holographic storage technology that the story poster referred to.
The article was also featured on Slashdot.
Less then a fourth of my drive is even used on my w2k workstation. I have another 20 gig drive on my gentoo linux box that is only like %12 full.
.net, which I just found out that I can't develop "viral" gpl programs according to the eula. Anyway all this is less then 5 gigs and I have lots of storage left on my 2 year old drive! Why would anyone besides mp3 bootlegers need a 100 gig drive for. Maybe thats the true market.
I have lots of programming apps including vc,vb,msdn,tlc/tk, active perl, python, apahce, openoffice, java se and ee, as well as all the internet browsers, quake III and the evil
I read in Microsoft's "networking essentials " that, if you made every man women and child on earth write a 2,000 page novel, you would barely equal a terrabyte! You can fit it all one of these new disks.
That fact that corporate databases can sometimes reach 1 terrabyte to me is truly astounding.
http://saveie6.com/
...is what would one do with a single hard disk that insanely huge?
I know that its the same mentality when the 386 was out and there was talk of a 2ghz processor and people said "I'll never be able to use that!"....but as processors slowly got faster and faster, we always found a way to use them to their full potential. Everytime a new program came out it would always look better and run faster on the faster chips. Yet, virtually all of todays major software applications still ship on a single CD-ROM a now, what, 18 (I think) year old technology--which holds 650MB per disk and require the same disk space...but I digress.
For casual use, an insanely sized drives serve no forseeable purpose. Even in data intensive situations like databases and video storage/editing, it is overkill. Oh well, maybe I'm just not seeing the future.
i know a lot of people building silent machines use the ide barricuda IV's. Apparently these are the quietest of the ide drives
Lawyers, MBA's, RIAA? A jedi fears not these things!
What is the current state of the art for BIOS capability? We're still hitting limits for drive size because they don't plan ahead. In fact it seems that for every motherboard I have ever owned the first drive I get for it works, but the second drive is bigger than the BIOS will handle. Will these 100 Terabyte drives exceed the current capabilities?
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
The companies that are still trying to make lots of money on spindles won't appreciate this..
Granted, many are transitioning their business models, but a Lot of money is still made selling storage.
Finally. We can stop deleting old porn to make room for new porn.
Seagate should just slowly introduce this. I mean if they jump to the threshold over night then what? Hard drives will be at the finite limit forever? That's not how you milk every penny out of someone. What if intel tomorow released a 1THz cpu? Sure it would put amd out of business but that is not how intel works. They increment as much as possible to hit every possible price-point for every possible human.
Still... Good job Seagate! I was getting worried now that IBM is getting out of the HD biz. Good to see that someone else can do some research.
I bet the warrenty for these drives only covers 4 hours/day operation, worse than the IBM Pixie Dust drives...
1 tequila 2 tequila 3 tequila floor
Your old floppies remind me about the data storage I used to work with-- 13 inch steel platters, 10MB per side encased in a plastic shell. No, I'm not that old, I just used to work in the Navy :p Now I use them for design etching, but they're real troopers... And easy as hell to crash. Speaking of which, anybody know where I can get more of em?
You need a FREE iPod Nano
I don't even use any more than 8 gigs at once on my hard drive. I don't need more storage! What i need is more performance!
1 disc? can you make it install on a 200mb HDD? Oh no... it wont even let you install it.
You have a 7-8 CD or a DVD from a linux distro pack, but I don't think you ever thought about what you have in there, if you need anything else let them know and you'll probably have it on the next relese.
And if you realy want you can install only what you need, you don't have to install all they give you on the DVD or CD's so stop complaining and ask yourself what have you installed from your XP 1 CD and you really don't need but you can't get them out without 1000 clicks...
And on topic:
I don't give a damn about the capacity of the hdd all I want is SPEED, today the HDD is the bottle-neck of the PC so I would be happier with a faster & cheaper 40GB HDD. (SATA looks promising.) And only after that a slower & cheaper 1000 GB HDD.
Wahoo!
Maybe Linux comes with allot more software than windows? Or did you actually say that Linux took more place than Windows?
Let me see,
Windows 1 cd
Development 4 cds
Office Package 4 cds
oops, 9 cds and thats not yet included all of what you
get on Linux such as, office packages, serveral guis, desktop enviorments, latest development enviorment, and much more...
If you can get 3x the storage for the same price, it might be worth using the lower-quality components (you can always replace them when they fail, since they're so cheap). Unless you need the absolute fastest performance, in which case you have to go SCSI.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
well, right now my main slack box is at about 320 gigs, with 10 of them free....SO BRING ON THE DRIVES
Doot!
I can't take it anymore! When's someone gonna prove all this "enough for the entire Library of Congress" crap, and just give me the friggin' Library of Congress on some kind of rediculously itty-bitty medium?
"I don't think I ain't" -Thompson's Corollary to Descartes
From the article:
"heating the disk and recording components makes it easier to write information, which is stabilized with subsequent cooling."
Hot processors, hot RAM, now even hotter Hard drives. More heat in the case, is this a good idea?
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo! http://goo.gl/J9bkO
It was the spear of Longinus (which help the starved crusaders repels the Turks at Antioch) that would give victory to an army that marched behind it, not the Ark of the Alliance. But Spielberg probably felt that it was not as powerful a symbol for the movie, and so the Nazis went after that instead, and film history was made!
Reminder: find a new sig
When reading this article in full (especially the supercomputer in a watch part) one thought came to mind: the future is gonna rock. This technology sounds really interesting, and from a physics standpoint I would like to know how heating the surface increases density. As I understand it, heated objects have a lower density.
SIGFAULT
Total fragmented files: 5,201,039
Total excess fragments: 91,434,108
I'm Rick James with mod points biatch!
It's called PCI-X:
(from http://www.pcisig.org/)Is that enough for you?
/Styx
FYi this information has been on the StorageReview.com forums for about a week. There is a small discussion there.
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
With solid state memory, seek time is virtually eliminated because the drive is physically mapped out and non-moving, wheras on a magnetic disk or CD/DVD the 'disc' spins - hence you get the seek time because the drive head(s) have to locate the physical point on the media where the data resides.
Are you local? There's nothing for you here!
SuperParaMagnetism?
I think by the way of increase in the IT industry, in 18 months we should be able to store a "SuperCaliFraJalisticExpiAliDocious" per square inch.
And it will probably have the durability of a may fly, especially if the FBI insist on everyone keeping 20 log copies just in case of naughtiness.
-- my age is showing, but I'm vaguely comforted by the thought that Mary Poppins is not as old as Longinus or even Richard Maximus
-- it must be true, it's on the internet.
But that doesn't change the fact that it's Seagate. Does anyone really use a Seagate HD? They have a really bad rep. It's usually Maxtor or WD for me.
mstyne: real name, no gimmicks
With a drive like that, you could just leave the uncompressed footage lying around. And people will.
duh
50 Gb/in^2? What in hell's name is that?
Can I please have this in something I can understand, like Libraries of Congress per square meter?
I have found this to be true for many speakers, especially "morale boosters," thus proving that Moore's Law is business mumbo jumbo.
In a seminar I once attended, it got so bad that I started making bets on how many times the windbags on the stage would each mention Moore's Law.
I'm really curious. Anyone know how long the 1.44MB floppy drive has been a part of 'standard issue' perhipherals with a PC? Are there any other portions of modern hardware that could use a well-accepted replacement?
You know, I've been thinking for a while that I'd much rather see companies put more effort into making existing-sized drives smaller and cheaper, than constantly bumping the storage level up and up.
I'm a web designer, I use some pretty space hungry apps, and image files can get pretty big too, but I can't think of any reason I would need even a 100Gb hard drive. Even if I put every audio CD I owned onto the machine, plus all my software, I wouldn't use more than 15% of it.
I would much rather have an 10-20 Gb Firewire drive that I can carry easily in a coat pocket, for a reasonable price (like an iPod, but even cheaper) than a 1Tb drive in my desktop.
IBM seemed to be on the right track a while ago, with their thumbnail-sized 1 Gb drive, designed for embedded devices. Any more news on stuff like this?
SofaMan -- Occasionally Battling Evil With His Mighty Powers Of Indolence.
Where are all the comments about Microsoft bloatware obligatory with an article like this? Maybe viewing Score 3's and above is keeping me from seeing them now.
I'm too tired to think of a good one myself.
Anyone know whatever happened to Flourescent Multilayre Disks? There was a lot of buzz a couple years ago but now nothing.
"terabits per square inch"
What the?! If this is so high-tech, why are they using square inch?
Ohhhhh....
,
... stock options I'll be invokin' !
SuperParaMagnetic limit Seagate says they've broken,
The bad news is our data bits will sometimes not be loadin'
If Seagate markets it loud enough next quarter will be smokin' !
So...SuperParaMagnetic Limit
----- In Your Cubicle No One Can Hear You Scream...
Hm, I can understand that this is beyond previous storage capacities, but I think this had been done before in the mid-90s. If I remember correctly, there were 2 or perhaps 3 different types of Magneto-Optical devices. Those worked by using a Laser (hence the optical, I guess) to heat up a specific part of the magnetic substrate so that it will be the only region that would be affected by a write. (and thus compensate for inaccuracies in the magnetic writing head, I guess?)
Well, I guess those devices had a different problem - but they used the same technology to fix it. (-how is the heating done in the new devices?)
I miss my rubber keyboard.(Homepage)
Hitler didn't have deutschmarks, he had reichsmark.
deutschmarks came after the third reich while creation of the bundesrepublik.
but neither are you
For some reason, your post was one of the most informative and insightful yet lowest-rated posts I've seen in a long time. I'd give you double mod points if I could. Know why? Because you invented a new "law" which compares (and predicts, one would hope) hard drive density to CPU capacity as pertains to PC usability. This could be an issue before to long. When does it start to hurt, though? I have no clue, so maybe we should figure it out now?
I'm serious, write it up. Get figures, plots, innuendo, meaning and reason in it. Make it Muerte's Law, and then cash in.
I'm totally serious. And you owe me a kickback if you do. Just a little taste is all...
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
Software has been described to me as a gas: it will expand to fill any container you wish to place it in.
Thus, if you put the same amount of air you can fit in a 250ml bottle in a 1 litre bottle, it will still fill it up. Similarly, if you give M$, or Apple, or Adobe or any other s/w maker more space, they'll use it =)
Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will! - Antonio Gramsci.
How stable are hard drives really? all that data is packed pretty bloody close already, so your vital, un-backedup accounts data is probably the size of a pin-head - that sounds very safe :)
On the plus side, hard-drives would make excellent containers for transporting drugs - imagine if you will, a hard-drive manufacturer who designs a hard drive with enough space so that it can still work, even when packed with cocaine. They seal up the air filter so dogs cant smell it, and then ship a whole lot of hard drives out somewhere. If police check them, they will see working hard-drives - that weigh the same as the manufacturers specs. Then, at the destination, the drugs are removed and replaced with weights to match the specs. then sold as hard-drives.
That was pretty off topic and lacking of spell check..
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There are plenty of tape media formats that can back up hundreds of Gb to a tape. They are simply very expensive. The reason they are expensive is that nobody backs their data up. If everyone used tape drives to backup their hard disks, the drives and media would be as cheap as floppies. As it is, only businesses back their data up so you pay business prices.
On a corporate basis, we use LTO in fairly large libraries to back up many tens of terabytes. Using disk arrays isn't acceptable, the data has to be offsite, and network bandwidth is too expensive to use offsite arrays.
If you're worried about it, take a look at Overland, they do some really nice, low cost libraries.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
Not kidding. Plus, you just add drives if you need more I/O.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
Magnetism is oriented atomic spin. The recent term for magnetic devices so small that the spin of individual atoms or molcules matters is "spintronics".
Better remember / forget ?
You are assuming that each platter is only an inch ?
.... or perhaps they're just using the ol' smoke an mirrors trick to try and increase their stock price..... . . . . is it just me or does nobody fucking trust big industry anymore???
Oh god, that woman is John Romero!
It's 50 terabits, not terabytes. So it would be 6.25 terabytes. Don't get too excited yet. :)
It's way past it's expiration date. So what if it holds petabytes. It's slow and it's one the main reasons of computer hardware failure. Crystal holography or layered optical disks are what are needed , NOT MAGNETIC SPINNING TURNTABLES.
Backup systems aren't keeping pace with hard drive storage. Neither is hard drive performance. Doing a format on a 120GB is an enormous pain... imagine formatting a terabyte drive. Worse yet, imagine such a drive at half capacity, being defragmented.
Very soon we'll have drives with more space literally than we can use, due to other constraints. I'd rather see work on these related issues.
.sigs are for post^Hers.
Tivoli Storage Manager has an incremental forever strategy. Sure the first backup would take a long time but every other backup would be quicker. Also the use of compression can increase the throughput 2-8 times depending on the type of data.
If hard drives have to CONTINUALLY refresh their data, you might as well be using volatile RAM. It's certainly much easier to wire a solid-state component to refresh each bit on every clock tick than it is to run a drive head over every single sector on every single platter of a mechanical disk within one tick...
If the magnetic instability is something that can be addressed by PERIODICALLY refreshing the data, which would recondition the disk surface to "like new" and reset the clock on degradation, then the technology has a place on desktops and other non-uptime-critical machines. FAT32 file system users are used to running Scandisk and Defrag on their drives already, there probably wouldn't be any outcry if a "Recharge Disk" task was added to the scheduler.
Certain backup software uses disk pools as a primary or initial backup method. The reason for this is that you get better tape performance if you can send a bunch of it at once. Plus if you have enough disk space for a complete incremental backup of all your systems the restores the next day will be quicker, then off load to tape. And certain packages Tivoli Storage Manager for instance has an incremental forever policy, depending on your needs you may not need to make a full archival copy every again, it would just stay on the system for a year. If you wanted to you could, but you don't have to. This saves on backup time and tape space as you only backup the file when it changes, and no its not like you need a years worth of tapes to restore either, there is a database that knows where the file you want is.
Many new drives these days use 2.5" platters. Less mass to spin at 15,000 rpm and therefore less power to do it. Also the standard form factor for drives will shrink to 2.5" from 3.5" in the next few years.
So new math:
4.908 - 0.196 = 4.712 in^2
4.712 *50/8= 29.45 TB per platter
platters count will probably go down to 1 or 2. Again less juice needed. Currently the push in enterprise storage is towards more spindles not bigger drives. This provides more IO pers sec.
Modern OSes, including Linux and Windows, have highly optimized disk caches, because a good disk cache is better in most situations. It's self-tuning and self-sizing in nature, it speeds up pretty much everything (as opposed to speeding up a few apps carefully set up to take advantage), and if it's very smart, it can manage optimizations that might be tricky with a RAM disk.
The Windows disk cache, for example, makes it possible to run code directly from cache memory - so libraries and executables don't end up double-dipping into the memory pool. This is why, when you examine the memory usage for a Windows machine, you'll often see a ludicrous amount of memory devoted to the disk cache, even to the point where there is virtually no free RAM at all. (My old 128MB machine generally gobbled up 80MB for disk cache, leaving almost no free memory, yet it ran very well.) Yet the machine will run smoothly (well, as smoothly as Windows ever does), because code is transferred to the disk cache and run directly from it, with a minimum of memory-shuffling.
So I guess my point is, with a well-tuned, modern OS, you may be better off adding the memory and cranking the disk cache up (if you can). There might be some niche applications where the RAM disk would be faster, but an awful lot of effort has been invested in making the disk cache ultra-fast; most of the time, it's the way to go.
I think IBM sold most of there HD r and d team to some Jap company....
After the instructions jump, compare and add (signed numbers), the rest is all fluff. (Assuming you have available memory)... Thats the funney part of Von Newman devices. The new pentiums are a marval of engenearing. Its fast and cheap. Normaly you only get to pick one (fast or cheap).
The name for this new technology.
Every 18 months^H^Hseconds they'll come out with something so we have to spend Moore Money.
FYI:
....
Good book
Atlantis Found by Clive Cussler
It's a James-Bond-like book that includes the spear and a plot to end the world.
Will it be the norm for a 10 page written document to be 100MB now? Will it take 10 DVD's to install the next M$ OS?
Back in the old days (85ish) drives were marketed with RAW capacity. Depending which controller you used (MFM or RLL) you got maybe 70-80 percent of the max.
Other than that, your numbers look good.
Daisywheel printer with carbon ribbon on acid free hemp based paper isn't too bad for modern language text, but berry juice and saliva on cave walls is the oldest proven graphics media.
It is now time to flip off your computer.
When they say "heat assisted" do they mean they must acutally heat the metal on the disc to allow recording onto the surface?
It has been known for a long time that heat can destroy magnets (you melt the magnetic metal, get all the particals moving and oriented randomly, let's hear it for entropy...) so it makes sense that heating portions of the platter can make magnetism or demagnetism quite a bit easier. But how hot do you have to heat the surface? Does this head dicipate around the portion trying to be written, and affect portions near it? How fast can this drive be (will we have to wait for cool-down)? If speed is an issue will this be a solely archival device, and is it actually usable for contant operation? How does heating affect lifetime of the unit?
Just food for thought.
An ideal form of government is democracy tempered with assasination -- Voltair
"A dictatorship would be a heck of a lot easier, there's no question about it." -George W. Bush
That will last longer than even paper.
Realistically, though, in 15 years or more, data will be chucked from one machine to another so often that this will all seem irrelevant. Your hard disk will be re-writing it's whole surface regularly.