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The Future of Hard Drives: Ballistic Magnetoresist

Posted by chrisd on from the flying-magnets dept.

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."

2 of 167 comments (clear)

  1. Hard Drives Can't Compete by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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?

  2. The more important matter: do they die as often? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.