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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."
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.
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.
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!
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
does this mean that it needs to be VERY hot in order to operate
It sits where the AMD heatsink use to go.
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.
Well, overcoming regular old laws is a bit easy these days for the major players, so it's good to see they're finding new challenges.
My deviantArt site
This isn't reporting, it's reprinting a press release verbatim. Jebus. Here's the original, from Seagate's site.
My deviantArt site
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.
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.
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.)
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
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.
Yes, well, for that you'll have to wait for them to figure out a way around the superultramegahyperparamagnetic limit.
spawn_of_yog_sothoth
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
Seagate ATA drives aren't the best, but their SCSI drives are. Period. They are the fastest, they are the most reliable, they are the most trusted.
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
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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