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.

How do they come up with this?

[adamofgreyskull]

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..

slashdot headlines

[X_Caffeine]

According to the past couple months of Slashdot headlines, the hard drive of tomorrow will use microscopic whiskers, be solid state, use nickel whisker-like filaments (oh wait, this is another repeat post!), be the size of a credit card, cost less than 1$/gig, run at 15000 RPM, use state of the art IBM pixie dust, support bluetooth, might even be Serial-ATA (...nah), and still be full of all the data you forgot to erase.

Enough "hard drive of tomorrow" articles, already.

Mechanical drives vs. solid state storage

[chancegray]

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?

It will never get here

[AppyPappy]

Devices might be on the market in 7 years, give or take."

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.

sensitive

[derhurz]

...at room temperature can detect a 100,000 percent change in voltage...

Big deal. I detected a similar change in voltage in my body, last time I was messing with the wiring in my flat.