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The Future of Hard Drives: Ballistic Magnetoresist
Hirsto writes "Found this interesting story about breakthrough research on next generation drives. Here is a link to the NSF press release on this technology which supposedly enables storage densities of greater than 1 terabit per square inch. Devices might be on the market in 7 years, give or take."
"No pr0n jokes, please..."
No joke about it - you give me space and I can fill it with pr0n.
"how big does a hard drive need to be?"
Infinetly big.
"I mean, once everyone is doing their own digital video, PVR software"
There is no limit on the PVR part. Why have to delete old shows when you could put them up on an internal p2p-like engine so people that missed the show can get it?
"archiving their entire music library in MP3 format..."
Mp3? Why? We use mp3 to save disk space at the cost of quality. I'm not going to get into a flame war, But if we had the space everything would be lossless.
"you're only up to a couple-hundred GB"
After my corrections, You're up to atleast a TB.
"Does a 4TB hard drive make sense in a personal computer?"
In 7 years? of course. 7 years ago, did the 200gig+ harddrives we have today make sense? Sure, you have your gifs, your texts from the scene, etc, but thats only a few houndred megs MAX.
"Can you apply the TB/inch in much smaller form factors, such as SD cards?"
Sure.
"Even there, do I need more than, say 20GB on a palm pilot?"
Factor in constant gps tracking on your palm (A neat new idea no ones done that I know of), Maybe throw some video/mp3 storage (recording?) on there since everyone likes integration.. 20gb sounds great.
"How do you back up such huge systems?"
Another?
"Summary: the server market has a use for these future maxi-drives, but they'll be a hard sell to the general public."
The general public of today, maybe, but this isnt a product review, its a future technology.
Pain lasts, kid. Its how you know you're alive. Sometimes I think this growing up thing is just pain management-TheMaxx
That won't work! You must to use integrals:
integrate ( 2 * pi * r , r=[0.5,1.6] )
assuming a 3.5 inch drive with a max radius of 1.6 (remember, the platters aren't 3.5 across... in this case only 1.2)
this will integrate using a ring method. you could also just do this:
A = pi * r^2 - pi * 0.5^2
which will calculate total area and subtract the inner area. meh.
Gee, it's nice to hear stuff like this once in a while.
I wrote the software that ran WD's servo-track writers (the last step in manufacturing HD's) at that time.
At the time, our field tech said that WD was using crappy media (platters), but very smart electronics. Apparently the media is the more expensive part to manufacture. Hence they were able to make hard drives cheaper than others.
-- I have monkeys in my pants.
Not just how many bad sectors, but their cylinder/head/sector numbers too. At least for the ESDI drives, that's because you'd have to manually key in the defect list when you formatted the thing. Today's drives do automatic defect management--drives still come with a list of bad sectors; the list is just stored on the platters themselves, rather than on a printed label. You can query the drive for its "P-list" (primary defect list) to get the sectors that were bad from the factory, and its "G-list" (grown defect list) to get the sectors that have gone bad since you got the drive.