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

Hard Drives Can't Compete

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

The more important matter: do they die as often?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Don't be short-sighted...

[gosand]

No pr0n jokes, please... how big does a hard drive need to be? I mean, once everyone is doing their own digital video, PVR software, archiving their entire music library in MP3 format... you're only up to a couple-hundred GB. Does a 4TB hard drive make sense in a personal computer? Can you apply the TB/inch in much smaller form factors, such as SD cards? Even there, do I need more than, say 20GB on a palm pilot? How do you back up such huge systems? Summary: the server market has a use for these future maxi-drives, but they'll be a hard sell to the general public.

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.