IBM's "Pixie Dust" Drives Improved

jeffroe writes "Infoworld has an article stating that IBM has enhanced it's 'Pixie Dust' technology yet again. The areal density has improved to 70gb per square inch! Apparently that means 80gb drives for laptops." IBM's also predicted hard drives to have 100gb per square inch by 2003. Storage space just keeps increasing.

Comments

How Much?

[pbinmt]

So, how much porn do you need to cary on a business trip anyway?

Who cares

[geek]

The storage capacity we have now is adaquate for at least another few years. I don't know anyone that uses more than 60 gigs, and they are few and far between.

What we need is faster drives. I'm personally sick of how slow ATA drives are. Every other aspect of computers has made leaps and bounds in speed, with this one exception. Why? A fast hard drive makes all the difference in system speed.

Re:Who cares

[JohnZed]

If you read the article, you would care, because you'd see that IBM is also introducing the first 7200 RPM drives for laptops. Finally!

Re:Who cares

[rtaylor]

The only way to speed up harddrives is to pass more bits infront of the drive head in a set amount of time.

Add more platters and/or readheads, spin them faster, or compress the bits so that more pass per revolution as more fit in the same space.

Since anything faster than 10k seems to heat up in a hurry you won't find them in a home system soon. Nor will you find 'large sized' drives soon. Good chance platters could become thinner, and put more into the housing but thats an expensive proposition. Data compression (physical, not mathematical) like IBM is doing is a very effective method of complying with your request.

Re:Who cares

[Graspee_Leemoor]

*You* may need more speed from your drives and not see a need for more storage space but a lot of other people, myself included, are crying out for my hard drive space.

Here are some of the reasons: (NB some already mentioned)

* movies, other AVIs like anime (one series of anime is typically about 4-5 Gig).
* CDs (especially take up more space in .flac format)
* video editing - you can have loads of 10G + files all over the place.
* scanned photo collections (hires takes a lot of space)
* games - a > 2Gig install is normal these days.
* ISOs for playstation emulator (These really add up)
* P2P download: if you have a decent amount of things downloading you need AT LEAST 40G just for your temp directory, and another 20G for the incoming folder.

So, I hope you were in fact trolling because your comment really looks like the modern version of "640K should be more than enough for anybody" (whether the Billster said that or not).

graspee

Re:Who cares

[Hadlock]

yeah, but a 7200 rpm drive eats roughly double the power (and produces more heat, too) than a 4800 rpm laptop drive. there's a reason drive makers prefer 4800 rpm drives for battery life...

Re:Who cares

[Metrol]

...you'd see that IBM is also introducing the first 7200 RPM drives for laptops.

Which has the additional benefit of acting as an in-flight gyroscope. Never have an unlevel lap again!

Re:Who cares

[JebusIsLord]

Actually as areal density increases so does read (but not seek) speed. This is because by packing more bits into one concentric ring, one spin of the drive reads more data even at the same speed (7200rpm usually for a good IDE drive). If you look at the performance of IDE drives they have been increasing steadily for years despite staying at 7200. This is why they keep having to bump the DMA mode, UDMA/33 was fast enough a few years ago on a 7200rpm'er, but slows down modern drives.

If these laptops are at college...

[grungebox]

...then the extra space is being used for three things (all during class):
1)pr0n
2)AIM
3)Anime

The score is now IBM: 1, Education: 0 (unless you're in a class about sending anime porn to your friends via IM)

Aereal Density measured in bits not bytes

[SirDaShadow]

FYI when they say an area of 70gb they mean 70gigabits per square inch not bytes...

Aren't they getting out?

[Faizdog]

Isn't IBM leaving the Harddrive market? I'm glad they're working on this though. IBM has recently been on the cutting edge of personal computing devices with being the driving force beyond harddrive research and technoligies such as MRAM.

Re:Aren't they getting out?

[siegesama]

Yes and no. Hitachi bought out that sector, and rather than shifting things around, Hitachi and IBM are forming a child company (whose name I do not know). The new company exists on IBM location, on IBM infrastructure.

Re:p0rn

[Trusty Penfold]

why else would you need an 80GB drive in a laptop?

Movies. Why pay for pay-per-view when you're on a business trip when you can bring 50 with you.

Of course, some of them may be porn, so your argument is partially correct.

Re:p0rn

[Anonymous Coward]

You crazy purist. Geek world would collapse without porn. Who would take care of all the technical stuff if there were millions of horny geeks just running around making suggestion to marketing babes and ending up in jail for sexual harrasement.

Backup

[Anonymous Coward]

Cool! Wake me up when they come out with 100GB backup drives.

Looks like the only hard drive backup solution these days is another hard drive.

Re:Backup

[coryboehne]

Of course the backup tech is actually getting more expensive than the hard drives are.... Consider trying to backup an 80 gig HDD onto 250meg zip disks...... that would really suck, or even onto 650-700 MB CD-Roms, that would still take 115 disks... at a cost of 50c each that's still 50 bucks, and when you consider the weeks time needed to make the back up... you see my point, the hard drives are cheaper backup storage than most other solutions.... Maybe this is a good thing though, consider, 1 small hard drive for backups, or,,,, a library of other media... I'll take the hard drive please.......

Re:Backup

[karnal]

Heck, try using tape sometime. Zip disks are expensive (and a little unreliable, the last time I used them anyways...)

I've got a DDS3 drive that was donated to me (ahem) and has worked perfectly since the installation. However, I almost balked at the current retail price of tapes. I believe Microcenter wants 10-12$ PER TAPE, of which, if you're storing MP3's, you only get about 11gig out of a tape. (The hardware compression is not good on decently compressed files, and actually ends up eating more space than the raw data would.....)

So, for 80 gigs (estimation), you need 8 tapes. Minimum 10$/tape, that is 80$. May as well buy another drive; let alone the speed of backup / restore and the tape change duties.

I've won 2 bids on ebay and now have 30+ tapes, brand new, for around 60$ total investment. Now I've got enough tapes to do 2 full backups of my server, and have some spares for incrementals and "oddball" machines. But sometimes, the time invested makes me wonder if I shouldn't just get a removable rack + a few 120gig drives........ and sell the tape drive....

Re:Backup

[addaon]

Where's that 100 years number from? I generally assume (based on experience) that CDs are good for 10-15 years in the box; I have no sense of the lifetime of DVDs, but I'd be surprised if it's that much higher. Never mind that $1 DVDs from ebay are almost certainly the cheapest and lowest quality possible; I'd be very reluctant to assume more than 5 years for such a disc. Any source?

smaller form factors

[inepom01]

The article mentions how they are cramming more space into existing form factors. I am guessing the 2.5" laptop HD standard. I would like to see them introduce new smaller form factors for ultra-portables.

Maybe they can finally cram an HD into a PDA? A 20 gig HD coupled with a Crusoe would make for a nifty phone/computer.

Re:smaller form factors

[ottffssent]

Check out Toshiba's 1.8" hard drives. They're found (surprise) in Toshiba's ultra-portables, as well as the Apple iPod, and other devices.

While the reduction from 2.5" to 1.8" doesn't seem like much (about 25%), it's actually enormous in terms of platter area. A 2.5" diameter platter has almost 10 square inches of surface area, whereas a 1.8" diameter platter has just over half that. The situation becomes even more pronounced when you account for a drive motor in the center. That's why Tosh's drive tops out at 20G whereas IBM's talking about an 80G drive in the 2.5" form factor.

Re:p0rn

[yobbo]

Video editing, for one.

Or, in your terms, "making pr0n" .

What to use this space for.

[FuzzyDaddy]

I like to think of it as a challenge. I just bought a new hard drive, and I can save all my photographs on them. (Not that I don't need to back up to CD-ROM...)

What to do with 10 times as much storage? I could start keeping home videos on there. Or store all the network traffic that comes on and off my computer indefinitely. Or keep track of the voltage waveform coming in off the power lines, and post processing it after a year to look for frequency shifts.

But this talk of "no-one but video pirates would need this" is silly. Just give it to me, I'll think of something.

Speed

[hackwrench]

But a drive running at 7200 RPM at greater densities can be faster than a 10000 RPM drive at lower densities, and a 10000 RPM drive would be very fast indeed.

Re:Speed

[AJWM]

But a drive running at 7200 RPM at greater densities can be faster than a 10000 RPM drive at lower densities

Faster at transfer rate, yes.

Faster at track-to-track seek time, very likely (tracks being closer together).

But faster in rotational latency, which is the major bottleneck, no fscking way.

Re:IBM seems to have a good track record

[sixthofmay]

I bought five 45GB 75GXP drives a year and a half ago. Three have failed so far. Doesn't seem like a very good track record to me...

75GXP tales from hell: 75GXP class-action suit filed

Simple Sandwich

[mdechene]

It involves sandwiching a three-atom-thick layer of the precious metal ruthenium between two magnetic layers. That seemingly simple step allowed researchers to increase the areal storage density.

I'm pretty sure that making a 3 atom sandwich doesn't seem simple to me.

Re:Old solution. It's called raid

[Uller-RM]

Four-channel ATA-100 RAID-5 cards can be had for under $200 today. Even if you only used one drive per channel and four 70GB drives that's still 210GB of space that can recover from a single drive failure, with solid read speeds and acceptable write speeds. (To recover from two or more drives failing at once means moving to P+Q redundancy, aka RAID-6, and you start moving into price ranges beyond the reach of the average hobbyist.)

Library of Congress

[CatWrangler]

How many of these laptops will fit inside of the Library of Congress? Maybe I asked the question backwards.

Teach a man to fish

[sporty]

Thus the lowercase letter b. if it were gigabyte, it'd be GB, like gameboy.

Re:Reliability

[AntiNorm]

I will never buy another hard drive from that company ever again.

Neither will I. A few years ago, an IBM hard drive I bought turned out not to work, so I of course RMAd it to IBM. The replacement drive they sent me didn't work. The drive they sent me to replace that one didn't work. It almost took a trip to small claims court to get this settled. Their customer service is, to put it nicely, nonexistent.

Re:Reliability

[gmack]

Yes but redundant is only usefull when youve taken other steps to make everything else as reliable as possible.

I simply don't buy the statement that 2 unreliable parts can be combined into someting that's more reliable than something that's better than both of them in the first place.

I've watched not one but 2 high profile projects have multi day outages because they bet their buisness on IDE raid.

Re:Reliability

[gmack]

Yeah it's a great help if the odds of a drive failing is rare but you can't risk it.

The problem here is that thanks to a general lack of quality in the desktop ICE space from vendors like IBM and fujitsu who will continue to sell known faulty drives the odds of losing 2 drives at once are sadly not in your favor.

Re:what about heat

[be-fan]

laptop HDs are still 4800 rpm. They don't put out much heat at all. What really puts out heat are those mobile P4s. I can feel mine through my 3/4" wooden desk. You *definately* don't want to use P4 laptops on your lap, not if you ever want to have children anyway. That'd be a funny statistic to know. Are P4 laptop owners less fertile than the population as a whole? What is it, 50% drop in sperm count for each 10 degrees over normal temp?

Re:p0rn

[Fweeky]

is there any other legitimate reason for Joe User to have so much disk space?

For a start, generally you want to have plenty of free space around to limit fragmentation. Cut about 30% from usable capacity there: 75GB usable -> 52GB you'd want to use.

Now, let's install a few games:

UT2k3 is 2.4GB, more if you have some custom maps. Except UT2k3 also wants the CD; you don't want to constantly swap in originals, so you rip the play CD and mount in daemon tools. That's over 3GB for one game.

NOLF 2 is ~1.6GB, plus easily 50MB+ of savegames, so let's say 1.7GB, plus daemontooled CD, that's 2.4GB.

Ditto for Battlefield 1942, which also needs the CD: 0.9GB + 0.7GB.

That's 3 games, eating a grand total of 7.1GB, or nearly 15% of our available disk space Addons can easily push this higher pretty easily, and savegames soon pile up to sizes that make Word .doc's look lean. I have a lot more than 3 games installed.

Email: I recieve a tonne of it, and I keep all of it, too. This year I chalked up 1.3GB.

Windows: 1.8GB here. Oh, and another 1GB of swap.

Backups: I mirror my ~/ and various other dirs to my Windows machine, that's another 1-2GB of junk, easily.

Logs: I log a lot. IRC, SSH sessions, email, firewall hits, all sorts. If I want to keep a few years worth, I want to be able to, because, damnit, it might be useful! One day I *will* make a nice graph using rrdtool of [whatever I logged].

Music: I'll admit I don't own much, and the RIAA probably would be rather irriated at my collection, but what I do own, I rip; the CD's barely get taken out once, purely because my computer is my sound system, and OGG's are the most useful format for me. 50-100MB per CD, multiplied by however many CD's I might own. 100 CD's isn't uncommon; 5-10GB, assuming I use OGG and not FLAC or another lossless codec. 20GB+ if I go lossless.

Movies: Ditto for MP3's; although legitimate use is probably closer to "If I want to make my own edit of I want the space to do it in". 10-15GB, easy. Plus maybe I want to keep those 6GB VOB's on my HD so I don't have to hunt for the DVD's and risk damaging/exploding them :)

8 DVD's * 6GB = 48GB. Oops. A friend of mine owns over 150 DVD's, I'm sure he'd love a couple of TB to store them in rather than hunt around his shelf for them.

TV: Let's not forget TiVo and friends. Hands up who wants multi-TB HD's for their PVR?

Alternate OS's: When I want to try out RH 8 or FreeBSD-CURRENT, I want the disk space to try it out. 5GB (at least) for the spare partitions.

Cache: 3 browsers, each with 200MB+ cache dirs. 600MB of tiny files that probably bloat to 800MB easily. I might like to give squid half a gig or more.

Source code repositories: I have 1.2GB of tarballs and source direcories, most aren't even full CVS repositories.

Versioning: I dream of a time when my filesystem is one big version controled repository. I want to keep every modification I make to my HD, at least in certain directories. Multiply current requirements by about 100.

That's about 55GB there, and I've not even got onto applications or central storage for all my digital data, or filesystem version control, and my requirements are only going to get bigger while I'm allowed to purchase permanent licenses for data.

Conclusion: Relatively average users could quite happily make use of multiple TB's of quiet, reliable, backupable, rollbackable and relatively portable storage.

Now, which of these count for laptops might be questionable, but then, how many people have a laptop as their primary machine because their £2000 machine cost them their entire tech budget? How many laptops come with DVD's? Wouldn't you like to have all your data at your fingertips wherever you are?

If not, well, you're not geeky enough for SlashDot. Get out ;)

Re:I have an entire TERABYTE!

[jonbrewer]

I have 140GB of OGGs and MP3s, 500GB of DivXs and VCDs (including porn), 100GB of installed games, 6 different OSes, and all kinds of other crap.

Yes, but do you have a life?

IBM USED to have a good track record

[Andy Dodd]

Until recently, IBM Deskstars were the best drives you could get.

Then the 75GXP came out... And Deskstars became Deathstars.

Conversely, Maxtor and WD used to SUCK. From what I've heard, both companies have really shaped up. (I hope so, my home machine's new drive is a Maxtor...)