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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."
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!
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.
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.
My deviantArt site
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.
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.
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.
Hm. Storing Internet snapshots(*)? Or, perhaps, using a never-overwriting filesystem that keeps all versions of a file around, or at least a full journal...
;)
(*) Or, for that matter, do as the Seagate press release suggests and store one Library_Of_Congress unit in a notebook computer...
'course, that's if the heating, cooling and laser don't add too much overhead in terms of size, weight and cost. It's not specified in either article.
Even something as mundane as switching to high-resolution uncompressed true-color movies might take advantage of more space. Say, 2048x1536, 24-bit color, 24fps = what, 216MBps required, which should be something like 1.48TB for a 2hr movie.
('course, there's the obvious question of how do you transport that, and whether the drive can sustain sufficient throughput... That kind of network bandwidth available to consumers would probably make Jack Valenti spontaneously combust, but unless newer, far denser DVDs or a suitable replacement media appeared, uncompressed video ain't too useful to him.)
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
It's called PCI-X:
(from http://www.pcisig.org/)Is that enough for you?
/Styx