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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."
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.
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.
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.
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. . .
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..)
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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
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
The heating doesn't increase the density of the material, per se. It makes the material more suitable for being magnetically altered, then apparently the cooling once the laser is no longer being fired at the disk surface makes the magnetic impression of the bits more stable.
In other words, they mean data density (bits per unit of area) rather than material density. (mass per unit of volume)
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"terabits per square inch"
What the?! If this is so high-tech, why are they using square inch?
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.