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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
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
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.
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.
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.)
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
State of the art is ATA/ATAPI-6 a.k.a. "Big Drive". It supports 48-bit addressing. That's 48-bit sector addressing, so the maximum size of a disk is 144 Petabytes. This standard also supports transferring 32MB of data in a single I/O. This is at least partly implemented in ATA-133 controllers.
After hitting limits at every factor of 4 (32MB, 128MB, 512MB, 2GB, 8GB, 32GB and most recently 128GB), they've finally got it right.
Take a look here for more details.