Nickel Sensors Could Raise Hard Disk Capacity

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."

Comments

Bloody hell.

[caluml]

Tiny filaments of nickel, thinner than a wavelength of visible light,

Is it just me or are we getting too clever? :)
Soon we'll be storing gigabytes on a single atom...

Spin states

[SirCrashALot]

That depends on how many spins an atom can have at once:) Welcome to the world of quatum mechanics.

Is it wise ?

[Anonymous Coward]

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 ?

Re:Is it wise ?

[TheSHAD0W]

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.

Re:Is it wise ?

[swordgeek]

Hmm. Several points come to mind.

1) So what's so unreliable about current storage? Disks can and do eventually die, but so do ***ALL*** mechanical devices. The magnetic lifespan of a disk is not clearly the limiting factor in the life of a hard drive. Half of the drives I replace die as a fail to spin up properly--not something we like to see, but an indication that the short life of the magnetic states aren't the most unreliable part of a hard drive.

2) I don't see any indication that this is 'fragile' technology, on the macroscopic scale. Sure the signals are smaller, but once you reliably detect them they can be amplified ad nauseum, and reliable detection is what this is all about.

3) Large scale enterprise storage in our current realm of thinking, requires high speed access and high reliability, and does NOT involve single drives. Hardware RAID5, RAID 1+0, RAID 5+0 (I've seen it done!) etc. is the way to get high reliability and high performance. Having a single hard drive, even one that's 100% reliable, isn't a reasonable storage solution for mission critical data, and so consequently there's not a lot of demand for a 100% reliable hard drive.

Re:Is it wise ?

[Waffle Iron]

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 ?

There was a brief time a few decades ago when the essence of my entire being was contained in a single molecule, with no backups! Luckily, I made it through that episode relatively unscathed.

Ever since then, I've been making backups like crazy.

Re:Is it wise ?

[shogun]

There was a brief time a few decades ago when the essence of my entire being was contained in a single molecule, with no backups! Luckily, I made it through that episode relatively unscathed.
Ever since then, I've been making backups like crazy.

I'm yet to make any fully redundant backups myself as opposed to your incremental ones, however I fear there may have %50 data loss in any such backups and the data space will have to be shared with someone elses.

Re:Is it wise ?

[anethema]

Maybe that says that we should be concentrating on fast solid state storage rather than trying to minimize the stuff we have now. Hard drives are currently the slowest and most unreliable equipment in our PCs today. Sounds like thats the bottleneck scientists should be working on.

Re:Is it wise ?

[rtaylor]

The backup process isn't so bad -- but have you tried a restore yet?

Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Tiny filaments of nickel, thinner than a wavelength of visible light

Then how do we know they're there?

Re:Huh?

[comptrav]

Visual light takes up just a small segment of the electromagnetic spectrum. There are shorter wavelengths they can use to detect it.

Re:Huh?

[Drakula]

Using a Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) or an Atomic Force Micoscope (AFM) would be my guess.

Ballistic?

[TheSHAD0W]

I dunno... First we had giant magnetoresistance, then colossal magnetoresistance... Ballistic just doesn't seem to fit. We should call it gargantuan magnetoresistance, or Herculean... I know! Let's call it "humongous magnetoresistance"!

Re:Ballistic?

[iomud]

I vote for ludicrous magnetoresistance.

Re:Ballistic?

[modecx]

Our platters have gone plaid!

Re:Ballistic?

[pacc]

Ballistic doesn't refer to any new physical principle. It's the fact that the nickel layer is just a few nm thick that removes statistical properties such as resistance since there just aren't enough atoms in the thin layer for electrons to collide with, hence ballistic electrons. Prepare for ballistic transistors when they grow sufficiently small.

I hope IBM don't have anything to do with this...

[Zog The Undeniable]

...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?

Advances in storage technology

[Karamchand]

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!

Re:Advances in storage technology

[Cali Thalen]

Computer evolution is starting to look like biological evolution (sorry to all the Creationists...)

Back when computers were akin to our old 1-cell relatives, it didn't take much to have a serious jump in usefulness. But now that they (and we) are vastly more complicated, significant improvements in individual aspects of the technology don't seem to affect the whole system as much, so they seem so much less exciting.

As I see it, progress is going to be coming more and more in small steps, taking much longer to affect a huge change.

But please, feel free to prove me wrong, I'd love to see the kind of jumps in usefulness that compters experienced back in the 80's.

Re:Advances in storage technology

[Jerf]

If you haven't seen the advances then you haven't been looking. The recent sudden jump to hundreds of gigabytes on the cheap, for instance, is AFAIK the result of this IBM research. Yes, that article talks about 16.8 GB drives but that was just the first one available under that technology; I believe it is used in all high-capacity drives now.

There is no real marketing benefit to describing the real tech behind such devices, only assigning them buzzwords and hyping them up, so you only see stupid buzzwords.

The computer industry is actually very good about getting major advances in the hands of consumers on a time scale measured in months after the practical advances are made.

New HD technology!

[apoc.famine]

If I had a nickel for every time...

Of course

[mccalli]

The more nickels you apply, the higher capacity hard drive you will get.

Phhh. I knew that and I'm not even American...

Cheers,
Ian

the speed?

[Sophrosyne]

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 :)

New sensation

[Autonymous Toaster]

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

Cool..

[Anonymous Coward]

"ballistic magnetoresistance"

Last time a drive failed on me, I made it go ballistic too, and it offered little resistance (however the concrete offered considerable resistance). Is this a similar thing?

Doesn't matter

[CedgeS]

Spontaneous flipping still poses an upper limit to magnetic data storage capacity. Basically, if you cram lots of bits too close together, they will start flipping each other.

see: http://domino.watson.ibm.com/comm/wwwr_thinkresear ch.nsf/pages/frontier399.html

under storing information for info on pushing this limit

What gets me..

[di0s]

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??

Re:What gets me..

[addaon]

You hit the nail on the head. I have a specialized need. Capacity wasn't an issue; for various reasons, I'm using two 128MB modules, and that's all I need. On the other hand, the write limits don't really concern me. As I'm using custom software, I can trade off the number of write cycles in exchange for reliability. I basically limit it to a maximum of one write per location per hour, and start moving things around on the disk if a single section consistently gets more writes than that. Again, also, I can check after each write whether it worked; if not, I just mark that byte bad, and go to a reserved backup area. Assuming my usage patterns stay relatively similar, or even double, the number of write cycles shouldn't be an issue for roughly a century.

Furthermore, I did destructive testing on a smaller unit (32MB) to get a sense of how accurate that 1M write cycle number is, since it did worry me for a bit. 1% of the write locations (byte sized) failed after 200k writes, going up to 2% at 500k, skyrocketing ;-) to 5% at 1M. Clearly not quite linear, but I'm not too worried. At 10M writes per location, 65% of locations were still writeable. Not ideal, I'd admit (that brings a 128MB disk down to ~83MB), but again, that would take a millenium with my usage patterns. (Currently, I'm reserving 16MB out of 128MB for repcing bad sectors. 16% bad sectors occured at around 4M writes.)

So you're right in that this isn't necessarily feasible for a standard PC. On the other hand, with different usage patterns, you could easily just use a RAM disk. A good sized linux installation is reasonable in 2GB; this is under a thousand dollars in compact flash, with direct compact flash to IDE adapters. 2GB of ram, likewise, is only a few hundred dollars. On boot, make a ramdisk. Only write back to flash if you get nervous; or do it once an hour, and last a century. (Note also that most IDE drivers do bad sector remapping; it's not ideal, because it uses 512B blocks instead of the 1B blocks that flash actually fails in, but it's zero modification to existing code.) Needless to say, it would be more expensive than normal to build a computer this way, but it really wouldn't be off the scale.

Re:I hope IBM don't have anything to do with this.

[Maul]

I agree. I think that the hard drive manufacturers need to stop focusing on how big they can make drives, and to start focusing on ways to make drives more reliable. A 200 GB drive is useless if it dies after six months.

What about performance?

[eyegone]

Storage vendors seem to be obsessed with capacity, mostly to the exclusion of performance. I already have customers wasting 75%+ of their disk capacity so that they can spread their data over enough drives to get the performance they need.

Microscopic $/MB is great, but only if you use all those megabytes.

Technobabble!

[Jogar the Barbarian]

Ballistic Magnetoresistance?? Souds almost like technobabble; I had a funny thought that you could automatically generate alerts like this every six months using a random "new technology" generator.

June 2003: Scientists have found they can dramatically increase hard drive capacity using *Ferrous Multipliers*!

January 2004: Scientists have found they can dramatically increase hard drive capacity using *Quantum Isolators*!

June 2004: Scientists have found they can dramatically increase hard drive capacity using *Magneto Flux Capacitors*!

Great, Just Freaking Great.....

[Not The Real Me]

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.

Re:Great, Just Freaking Great.....

[ivan256]

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?

We need solid-state HD's!

[Faeton]

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.

What about...

[Tuxinatorium]

Carbon nanotubes? Like fullerenes, except they're long cylenders instead of spherical. And they conduct electricity quite well.

Re:What about colorizing the bits?

[alannon]

You can't do this for modern optical media because the size of the details of the media is close to the wavelengths of visible light itself. Once you get to that size, there IS no 'color', to speak of, since color is just the size of the wavelength itself. Conventional CD players use red or infrared lasers, I believe, which have a wide wavelength. DVD players on the other hand, use ultra-violet lasers, which have a much smaller wavelength and can be used to read finer details.

My 60GXP in my Tivo keeps on tickin'

[John Jorsett]

I don't know what all the fuss about the 60 GXP is about. I've had one running nonstop in my Tivo for 2.5 years with nary a problem. Of course those OTHER 3 I've replaced in my computers kind of ruin the averages ...

Fluid Dynamic Bearings...and washingmachine drives

[skogs]

They are trying to make disks more reliable. Fluid dynamic bearings (FDB) don't wear out as easily as ball bearings. You know...that grinding sound that your disk makes as it spins up and searches for data...yeah that goes away with FDB.
I was just checking out a drive by western digital yesterday with FDB...a 160Gig unit. I think it was about a buck a gig, and I would assume much more reliable than my current lowly 30Gig and 20Gig drives...
ahhh...progress...

Hell, I remember being able to work on those REAL hard disk drives. You know, the cartridge ones. Roughly 15 inches in diameter...placed on a unit that stands up to your waist...with a reader arm as big around as my thumb that juts in and out like a pogostick....

Yeah, those were the days. Those drives are still usefull for the sake of basic electronics study though...makes it nice so that the students can see teh inner workings of a disk drive. I think they only stored like 8 Megabytes....maybe less. :) Sure beat tapes at least.

Girls

[SB5]

Girls have been saying this for years; Size doesn't matter. Anywho, what girls really want is reliability, at least that's what I have been told.

Then again, I'm slacking on that end, among others....

This could be applied in other ways too

[zorander]

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

"Ballistic Magnetoresistance?"

[Maxwell'sSilverLART]

"Ballistic Magnetoresistance?" I thought that was the resistance offered by the magnetic platters when I use my .45 to read-protect my drive from the FBI/BSA/MS.

Giant, Colossal... Ballistic?

[wirelessbuzzers]

This sounds like vaporware. It will never make it to the market: "ballistic magnetoresistance" just doesn't capture the imagination. Extraordinary magenetoresistance was a good start, but I'm looking for the next biggest thing in hard drive technology from either "bloody huge magnetoresistance" or "fucking enormous magnetoresistance" technologies.

Geez. They might as well have named it obese magnetoresistance. Ballistic my ass.