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."

Comments

Re:What is big enough?

[irc.goatse.cx troll]

"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.