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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."
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.
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?
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This is *way* beyond Moore's Law, though. They're proposing a thousand-fold increase in storage densities, which equates to (approximately) ten doublings, not one every year and a half. According to Moore's Law, we shouldn't be approaching those densities for another 15 years....
So, who's been lying to us all along? The hard drive manufacturers or the physicists? =]
.f00Dave
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.
This isn't reporting, it's reprinting a press release verbatim. Jebus. Here's the original, from Seagate's site.
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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.
As I posted to another message, we are currently phasing out tape in favor of keeping many copies of data on various RAIDs for backup. You are correct, I'd call it a "backup crisis".
The biggest helical scan 200GB tapes are very very expensive compared to hard disk prices. We have over 4TB of disk space at work, most of it is redundancy (not counting RAID redundancy), but we do have almost 1TB of live data.
I've resorted to creative rsyncing for main backups, the Macs use retrospect (we are going to soon target that to a hard disk rather than tape), Veritas and the 1TB tape robot are still running, but too slow and cumbersome to be practical (if we ever needed to restore the full 1TB of data off that thing it would take weeks).
And really, who do we have to blame? I'd look at the MPAA... who has the most to lose from large removable media?
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
More interestingly, however, is the huge gap between processing speed and memory speed. Most slashdotters are probably already aware of this potential problem. Consider this analogy:
You are taking a journey from Denver to Normandy. There are 3 legs of the trip: Denver to NYC, NYC to Paris, Paris to Normandy. Denver to NYC and Paris to Normandy are set in stone - 4 hours each. No way around it. However, you have a decision to make regarding the NYC to Paris leg. you can take a 747, which will take 8.5 hours, or a Concorde, which takes only 3.75 hours. So the total time is as follows:
4 + 8.5 + 4 = 16.5 --- by 747
4 + 3.75 + 4 = 11.75 --- by Concorde
So the speed up is only 1.4/1 taking a Concorde instead of a 747, even though the Concorde goes 2.2 times as fast as a 747! That is not such a great performance improvement!
A direct analogy lies in Processor to Memory speeds. You can speed up the processor all you want but the bottleneck lies in memory speed. More capacity is always great but I can only download so many mp3's (and knowing the RIAA these days that number is very limited....).
Both Processor and Memory speeds are growing linearly. The rate of growth of processor speed is much higher, however. You can double your clock speed (buy a 2 GHz proc to replace 1 GHz) but you will see nowhere near double the performance!
In any case, I've made my point several times over. I'd like to see these companies concentrate on speeding up memory. Not just long term storage but Cache and RAM as well. Watch for memory speed improvements; they are few and far between! Write your local congress(woman|man). =p
Ben
"I either want less corruption, or more chance
to participate in it." -- Ashleigh Brilliant
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
Intel, and many others, are constantly working on new technology. The Pentium is what it is because of market demand, and because it's cost effective for them to market it. that's business.
Obviously, at some point this will not do.
I mean look at the Earth Simulator (#1 on Top500.org by a factor of 5)... it's not Intel based, or x86 based at all.. neither are most of the supercomputers in there.
We are doubling our speed every 18 months by improving current technology.. that sounds pretty good to me.
...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.
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.
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.
It's called PCI-X:
(from http://www.pcisig.org/)Is that enough for you?
/Styx
So, the 270 million people in America equals every man, woman, child on earth?