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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."

5 of 167 comments (clear)

  1. How do they come up with this? by adamofgreyskull · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Chopra said the ballistic electrons lead to clearer binary signals -- at least in part. However, "we don't fully understand how the signal is enhanced to such very large degrees," he said. "The existing theories don't yet explain it. There are some things here no one quite understands. That means there's a lot of science to be discovered yet."

    Do they just try making bits smaller and smaller, and out of increasingly diverse kinds of materials until they find something that works or what? Serious question..
  2. Mechanical drives vs. solid state storage by chancegray · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Shouldn't we be moving over to some time of solid state storage devices soon? It seems like it would be a more reliable solution than all the moving parts in hard drives. Does anyone have some links on this?

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  3. Nanotech by Gryftir · · Score: 3, Interesting

    What's really juicy to me is the applications for nanotech, as mentioned in the article. I wonder if this kind of technology could be used to tranfer data to nanites. Now that *would* be a small hard drive.

    Gryftir

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  4. What is big enough? by unfortunateson · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

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  5. Re:20 GB enough? by dontod · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Every time there's a submission about bigger hard drives or faster CPUs someone always says 'you would only need this if you are a pirate/warez d00d'

    I, like others have a DV camcorder. I only have 15 or so hours of tape and I'm currently putting this uncompressed (to use with premiere) online. 1 hour = 13gb, so I'm already using 1 x 120gb drive and 2x 40gb.

    I would *love* a 1 terabyte hard drive right now, not in 3 years. Then I could add my legally owned DVDs, my 400 CDs in an uncompressed format and any other media such as captured TV programs.

    There are many 'legal' home uses for such storage. Luddite!

    Don

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