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

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

[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

[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.

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.

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.......

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.

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: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: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.)