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Nickel Sensors Could Raise Hard Disk Capacity

Posted by timothy on from the why-if-i-had-a-nickel-microsensor-for-every dept.

Makarand writes "Tiny filaments of nickel, thinner than a wavelength of visible light, acting as magnetic sensors may expand the storage capacity of hard disks many times. Although, technologies exist to increase hard disk capacity, reading data bits reliably from such disks has proven difficult because as data bits become smaller their magnetic fields are weaker and difficult to pick up. Nickel filaments are capable of picking up of these weak magnetic fields using a phenomenon called "ballistic magnetoresistance" which is not completely understood. As the sensors are only a few atoms wide the electrons travel along a straight line in the conductor greatly enhancing the binary signal picked up from the data bits. These sensors could also be used to detect biomolecules in low concentrations."

13 of 198 comments (clear)

  1. Is it wise ? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful


    To store critical (or any data of some value ie: not junk) data on technology that is so vunurable to external forces if the technology is so small/fragile ?

    wouldnt it be better to concentrate on more reliable rather than greater storage ?

    1. Re:Is it wise ? by TheSHAD0W · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Actually, making this stuff smaller has made it LESS fragile, not more. Less weight and shorter distance from bearing points means less torque and strain. 5-1/4" HDs were quite fragile, but 2.5" laptop drives are very hardy. And just try causing a head-crash on a Microdrive.

      I suspect, if this technology ever makes it to market, it'll be in a package that keeps it nice and safe.

  2. I hope IBM don't have anything to do with this... by Zog+The+Undeniable · · Score: 3, Insightful

    ...as I had the first HDD failure warning this evening on my "auto destruct after 12 months" IBM 60GXP. I wouldn't mind so much if it had been hammered, but it's in a PC that gets used about twice a month. Does 99.9% of the population care less about the availability of 200GB hard drives? Surely the priority should be data security, then speed (it's the biggest bottleneck in your PC), then capacity?

    --
    When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
  3. Advances in storage technology by Karamchand · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Where and when will I - a normal consumer - be able to notice all those fantastic advances, like pixie dust, nickel filaments etc.? Sure, I notice a nice increase in storage capacity, a decrease in cost (and a warranty decrease;) - but nowhere I can see fantastic, large changes!

  4. the speed? by Sophrosyne · · Score: 2, Insightful

    How much slower will hard drives be? Or will they get faster? ...it just sounds slower to me,
    Shouldn't more reasearch be made into solid state memory? I'm not a big fan of hard drive noises and grinding... but hey any research is good research :)

  5. New sensation by Autonymous+Toaster · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Chopra said the sensors also could be used to detect biomolecules, even in low concentrations. Each organic molecule could have its own fingerprint in terms of affecting whiskers' voltage.

    Though the data storage application could certainly serve to fund the development and popularisation of this technology, it seems possible that in the long term the quoted "secondary" application may actually be the primary one. If the device can be tuned to detect virtually anything, it has obvious applications in industrial processes, bomb detection, and so on. This is incremental to existing efforts in these areas.

    However, if it can be further trained to distinguish, it essentially amounts to an electronic "sense of smell". This is very exciting and has innumerable applications, especially in combination with other sensor devices and realtime feedback mechanisms involving both software and hardware.

    A hypothetical consumer application might be to control the temperature that a bread product is grilled at, bringing it to a perfect (and user-selectable) stated of brownness, while turning down the heat in individual spots at the slightest hint of burning. Wonderful development

    --
    Could I interest anyone in some toast?
  6. What gets me.. by di0s · · Score: 5, Insightful

    What chafes my drawers is that fact that we're looking to increase capacity and not reliability. Isn't the average life span of a hard drive only about 5-7 years? What ever happend to solid state storage??

  7. Re:Huh? by Andorion · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Notice the above was modded +1 Funny, not +1 Insightful

    -Berj

  8. Re:Am I the only one by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Yes, so shut the fuck up.

  9. Great, Just Freaking Great..... by Not+The+Real+Me · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I've got a bad 41GB IDE HD with bad sectors, a bad 30GB with bad sectors, a dead 20GB HD and a 60GB IDE HD that is acting irrational. I've also RMA'd three 30GB IDE HDs in the last year.

    The ironic thing is I've got five 5.25" full height 9GB SCSIs that are 10+ years old and they work PERFECTLY!

    Before increasing capacity, I'd rather see them increase RELIABILITY. I don't care what they specs say about MTBF. I want real world reliability because I am tired of restoring or having to recover failing drives.

    1. Re:Great, Just Freaking Great..... by ivan256 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      The first 5.25" 1GB hard drive was introduced in 1994 (9 years ago). Your 9GB drives are no older than 6-7 years. They are certainly not 10+ years old.

      Any properly treated <= 10k RPM SCSI disk drive you get today will likely last just as long. Also, if it's still working after three years, it'll likely be working after six. You'll find almost all the defects in the first 18 months. It's should be no surprise that cheap IDE disks will be less reliable than the more expensive high quality SCSI disks. They're not just more expensive because of industry colusion. The extra quality costs more to manufacture. Considering that the upgrade cycle for x86 PCs has been less than 2 years for 5 years or so, can you blame the hard drive manufactures for being cheap when a very small percentage of their customers will care?

  10. We need solid-state HD's! by Faeton · · Score: 4, Insightful
    We don't need more HD storage, realistically speaking. Unless you're doing some serious video editing/archiving the internet/archiving pr0n, the 180 gig HD's will do you just fine.

    What we do need is faster access/read times, and an easy way to get that is a solidstate HD. Not a huge amount of storage, maybe about 5-10 gigs worth. Enough to hold the OS and commonly used apps. With RAM prices as low as they are now, where are these things?! I want nano-second access times, not miliseconds! Imagine booting your computer in 3 seconds. Now that would be progress.

  11. This could be applied in other ways too by zorander · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Now that we can have (massively?) increased storage capacity per square inch, shouldn't we start seeing hard disks in the 3.5" form factor that are really 4+ way RAID volumes with a builtin hardware driver to make it behave as a normal disk would? That way you'd get basically what you have now but MUCH more reliably and maybe even a little more capacity. (depending on the massiveness of the change this development can cause in size/data ratio)

    Running a PC or a 1U web server on a single hard disk is making for an awfully large failure point if it dies--it's the least replaceable component cause of data loss and they die a lot. Introducing redundancy at this level could help a lot with that issue (and help high density multicomputer serving become more reliable and fault tolerant)

    Brian