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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?
Yes, they might be on the market in seven years. So might cold fusion and room-temperature superconductors.
And cloaking devices.
And an honest politician...
Game dev and music blog
Terabiit BM announced their latest offering in the 'Eye of the Needle' premium hard drive series, the LOC Plus, which uses the planetary orbit measurement of data storage and promises to hold in excess of 10X12> LOCs. The new unit goes on sale just in time for this season's channel fest on DynSat XIV.
1x10^15x5.25= a lot of porn in the space of a single drive bay!!!
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?
Sounds really dangerous! I'm calling Ashcroft now!
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.
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."
Look like the Continuum are winding the IBM engineers up this week.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
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..
Enough "hard drive of tomorrow" articles, already.
// I will show you fear in a handful of jellybeans.
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?
Its obvious Bill Gates made all of his money off of the Vegas version of Windows Solitaire.
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
http://www.santacruzbynight.com/index.shtml Santa Cruz By Night Vampire Larp
That's forever!
7 years is 49 years in computer years. Seven years ago, I was running Windows 3.1 on a 486 in my office. I'll either be pushing up the daisies or in a zoo with the placard "Last Remaining COBOL Programmer" over my cage.
If you aren't part of the solution, there is good money to be made prolonging the problem
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
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.
Design for Use, not Construction!
Hard Drives: Ballistic
whenever I go out to buy new hardware, my wife goes ballistic. Does this count too?
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.
Big deal. I detected a similar change in voltage in my body, last time I was messing with the wiring in my flat.
-- yes, i know it hurz...
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.
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.
Gee, it's nice to hear stuff like this once in a while.
I wrote the software that ran WD's servo-track writers (the last step in manufacturing HD's) at that time.
At the time, our field tech said that WD was using crappy media (platters), but very smart electronics. Apparently the media is the more expensive part to manufacture. Hence they were able to make hard drives cheaper than others.
-- I have monkeys in my pants.
Not just how many bad sectors, but their cylinder/head/sector numbers too. At least for the ESDI drives, that's because you'd have to manually key in the defect list when you formatted the thing. Today's drives do automatic defect management--drives still come with a list of bad sectors; the list is just stored on the platters themselves, rather than on a printed label. You can query the drive for its "P-list" (primary defect list) to get the sectors that were bad from the factory, and its "G-list" (grown defect list) to get the sectors that have gone bad since you got the drive.