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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."
Did anyone else find the quoted statistics confusing?
Each of the filaments can read infinitesimal magnetic fields and at room temperature can detect a 100,000 percent change in voltage. Shouldn't that be a 1/100,000 percent change?
As proved by IBM's recent move to dump its storage division, hard drives can't compete with other forms of storage. DRAM memories have gone down in price dramatically, to the point that they are on par with what magnetic storage prices were eight years ago. All this while maintaining their tremendous speed advantage. How far off can battery backed RAM storage systems be?
The truth is, though, that neither system is much faster than it was eight years ago. While CPU speeds have increased tremendously (ten times or so), RAM and hard disk storage speeds have increased to about twice what they were. The forms of mass storage that have increased much more are getting more compelling. Optical storage has increased in speed dramatically, while falling in price even more dramatically. New higher density DVD replacements can only continue this trend.
I expect that the combination of cheap super high performance mass storage (battery backed DRAM) and high speed mass optical storage (DVD replacements) will doom hard disks to the history cabinet of history. I know that I will be cheering when they are replaced by high speed optical media. After all, what good is your data if you can't see it?
Really, for most non-warez (and related) people, a 20GB harddrive would be more than enough. Of course I'm aware of servers, datacenters, people working in film production, the music industry, et al, but these are hardly the majority of harddrive buyers.
What I'd like to see is not "Terabit blahblah" but "secure, reliable blahblah".
I don't want one of my harddrives to die every few months, despite quite light use.
I don't want to have to back everything up in three places, out of fear for losing all my important work.
I don't want my drives to go *whiiiiiiine KACHLUNK* for no damn reason at all. This actually happened yesterday with a drive only half a year old. Back in the 80s, the drives in my computers never died, and I can still boot up that ol' Macintosh SE, and the harddrive works. That's more than I can say about any of my computers from the late 90's.
I want my harddrives to be as reliable as my RAM.
How many Libraries of congerss (LOC) can I fit onto a drive the size of a credit card?
um, time was, 3.4 gigs were enough Pent II systems
time was, 200 Megabytes was plenty Pent/Pent PRo
time was, 20 megaybytes (pc xt) was plenty
time was, a 300k floppy was plenty apple
Wait for it, and the usefulness of a terabyte to a home user will be achieved in our lifetimes
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
The parent post ranks up there with "640K of memory should be more than enough for anyone".
Saying 20GB should be enough for most people lacks a certain amount of perspective that you only get with a lot of time in this industry. (I am guessing that you are less than 25 yrs. old, fairly new to the computer industry, or you really haven't given that comment much though - in haste to make a different point that reliability is more critical than size....tell my girlfriend that.)
When 40MB drives came out, similar comments were made. When miniscule hard drives came out on the PC AT, similar comments were made.
The reality is that it's difficult to foresee what the future will bring as far as storage needs, but the cool thing about this industry is that storage requirements expand to meet or exceed capacity.
Here's a case in point.... Do you think that the average person's brain holds less than 20GB of data? I bet it's FAR more. My feeling is that a PC designed to assist the human can grow to demand similar amounts of storage to the human brain - why not?
So my non-revolutionary prediction is that average software for average people will continue to demand more and more storage for the next century, and that 10 years from now, YOU will shutter at the fact that you ONLY have 20GB on that old circa-2003 PC, or will have long since abandon it for a much larger storage medium.
Please come back to slash-dot in 10 years and repeat your comment that 20GB is plenty for the average user.
I'd like to know what you base your assumptions on. I do not have one byte of warez or pirated anything on my main workstation at home, and I'm using 54 out of 60 gig. Add up the OS, applications/games, MP3's (ripped from CD's that I bought legally), personal data, etc. etc.
I just love when people make pronouncements like that here, like they have actually done a survey and statistical analysis.
Twenty gigabytes is enough for a casual PC user, barely. I'd say 60-100 is a better bet for today's 'power user', at a minimum.
Remember the days when the advent of Cd-ROMs was to be the death of hard drive space worries? Look at us now: 4 or 5 cd game distributions are fairly common. Every time an MP3/OGG article comes up here a handfull of audiophiles coment on how no true audiophile would give in to a lossy format. These are problems today that could be solved by this.
Think about future technology though: How much storage space will 3D holographic projections take? With terrabytes of disc space game textures could be highdef photographs. Models in games could have insane detail and polycounts (assuming that other graphics tech keeps advancing). High detail virtual worlds... A driving game where you can drive to every city in the world... I mean.. when's the last time you heard anyone bitch about having too much space on their hands?
If you're connected to a fat pipe, people tend to stop worrying so much about hoarding stuff, and start using it instead. I know some people sitting on a 100mb line, and they're mostly interested in streaming stuff. E.g. stream music from their computer to the computer at the party they're at, for instance. Or to download at whereever they can plug in with their portable player.
The reasoning is this - if you can stream it faster than you can use it, why care about downloading it? E.g. they look at other peoples movies over the network - directly from that machine. Unlike now, where everybody with a slower line (even normal broadband is "slow" for what I'm talking about) "have to" have their own copy. Imagine if you and your friends simply mutually mapped up folders, would easily cut hard disk use by far.
This just works for things that are naturally streamable, like music and movies. As for things where you need the full thing at once, like games, I remember "The 7th Guest" that came on 2 CDs back in... ancient history. Most games are still on 3 CDs or less. So relative to hard disks, they've become smaller and smaller...
So yes, I also think that the need for enormous hard disks might not be that incredibly big. But not because they don't need it - people will simply have access to other peoples files as excellent substitutes.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
They're still priced as server-class disks for holding stuff that gets used often, kinda like a huge cache. I was hoping they would start showing up in laptops, as they would have the most need of shock protection, but so far I haven't seen any. Presumably, with all the laptops being used as the *only* PC, most people want a fairly sizable hard disk and not just a few GB of SSD, and I don't think there's room for both. As for me, having both a PC + a laptop, I would certainly welcome a SSD laptop.
P.S. If you want links, check out http://www.storagesearch.com/ssd.html
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
It still amazes me that tech people can be so short-sighted.
Stop thinking with your current brain - think with the brain that you'll have in 10 years! Think about where we were 10 years ago. What was the fastest PC you could buy? I believe that the Pentium was just being released. Now I have a Pentium that just acts as my firewall, because it can't really do much else. Hard drives were around 200 MB I think. What if engineers back then said "why would you ever need more than 200 MB?" Reasons for more storage? How about 100GB on a card the size of a compact flash card. For what? How about to replace DVDs? We rip our music to the MP3 format to save space. We encode movies to save space. Ask a TiVO owner if they would like to have a TB drive. Then ask a TiVO owner who has HDTV.
Your backup issues are not relative either. How do you back up a 100MB drive? With a bigger drive. How do you back up a 10GB drive? With a bigger drive. You can see where this is going.
Think about this: Look at the way drives work now. We (well, the OS really) reuses the space on them, and has to keep track of where all the data physically resides on the disk. What if the drive was so large, say 10 TB, that you didn't need to do that? Instead of deleting something off the drive, you simply write it to a new location and move on. I know that is what happens now, but there would me less management of that data if it didn't have to consider size constraints. Now we use disks that spin, and talk about seek time and platters. With advances in storage, these could be things of the past. Who knows, maybe data will be stored in an organically organized 3D matrix of atomic-level particles, and seek time will be static. Maybe there will be no heat build-up, no moving parts to fail.
The possibilities of endless, instant-access storage would be amazing. 24/7 digital video recording for security systems. Las Vegas alone could use this. No more wondering "do I have enough space to install this?". Want to install the latest release of RedHat 23.0, just install it to a new partition (or quadrant, or whatever we have) and go.
I am just throwing out stuff here, but we have advanced pretty far in 10 years because of advancements in technology. Sure, the ideas have been there too, but the technology has to be in sync for it to take off. (Apple Newton?) I know the tech industry hasn't been around that long, but we have some history to look back on. Don't say things like "I'll never use that much space" or "Why would I need a processor that powerful?". We will need it, we will think of ways to use it.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.