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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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
Wristwatch mounted storage might be nice, though...
Yeah, I was thinking more along the lines of an identity database record of yourself implanted under your skin. It could record your identity, the places you've been and when you were there. It could record your body chemistry content, heartrate on a moment-to-moment basis and all sorts of other forensic data. Sort of a "black box" for your body.
And of course such technology could also prove guilt or innocense when accused of a crime.
Okay okay... mod me down... this is definitely off-topic.
Oh okay... about about I add something about my growing porn collection and how I need larger drives to support my Gnutella habit...
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
I was just thinking that heat was what computers could use more of these days...
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)...
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.
50 terabytes per sq. in. 'ought to be enough for anybody!
Think nothing is impossible? Try slamming a revolving door.
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Anyone who doesn't recognize where it's from should be shot, anyways. ;-)
Sun (Ultra 60's and Sunblade 1000's at work both have Seagates), Dell (Precision 420), Dell (6500 (I think) has bunches of em). Their IDE drives may not be the best but their SCSI stuff is obviously up to par at least.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
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.)
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
mmmm hmmm.. hard research. I bet.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
Perhaps aliens have been seeding our civilization with technology for longer than I had suspected
Of course they have, they are trying to kill us off so they have a home for their alien-style hamsters. They brought us the hammer so that we could hammer nails into boards in the hope that one day we would create a board with a nail in it so big it would destroy us all! or something like that, its some simpsons thing I dont remember very well
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
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
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!
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
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?
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)
This message brought to you by the Council of People Who Are Sick of Seeing More People.
"terabits per square inch"
What the?! If this is so high-tech, why are they using square inch?
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.
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..
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
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".
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.
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.
You'll never have the Library of Congress on a portable storage medium because every work added to the Library of Congress after 1928 will crumble to dust (or be incinerated when the Sun goes red giant) before it enters the public domain.
The copyright laws that ensure this come from, of course, Congress.
Oops, sorry about that. As a native French-speaker, I unconsciously made a direct translation of the french name ("arche d'alliance") into english. Of course you're correct, the correct english name is Ark of the Covenant - covenant being a synonym of alliance, in this case the alliance between God and humanity.
Reminder: find a new sig