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Next Wave Of Hard Drive Tech: Perpendicular Recording

Posted by timothy on from the dig-for-your-data dept.

angrytuna writes "New serial technologies are set to replace standard SCSI and ATA (Advanced Technology Attachment) interfaces over the next two years, even as hard-disk drive manufacturers prepare for an entirely new form of bit storage. Perpendicular recording will replace longitudinal recording in storage devices, placing bits on end instead of lying them parallel on the disc surface, thus dramatically increasing the possible storage density."

4 of 380 comments (clear)

  1. Density doubling annually; access speeds lag by Allen+Varney · · Score: 5, Insightful

    This conversation with Jim Gray, head of Microsoft's Bay Area Research Center, has grim, eye-opening comments on the growing gap between storage densities and access speeds/bandwidth. Currently the most effective way to send a multi-terabyte disk array is by UPS -- turns out a UPS truck has a "bandwidth" equivalent to about 7 megabytes/second. And the problem of practical access speeds is only going to get worse. At current and near-future access speeds, searching a 20-terabyte disk might take a year.

    "At the FAST [File and Storage Technologies] conference about a year-and-a-half ago, Mark Kryder of Seagate Research was very apologetic. He said the end is near; we only have a factor of 100 left in density--then the Seagate guys are out of ideas. So this 200-gig disk that you're holding will soon be 20 terabytes, and then the disk guys are out of ideas. The database guys are already out of ideas!"

  2. Density is nice, but I need speed! by smokeslikeapoet · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Storage density is one thing, but storage speed is another. With 200 GB hard drives readily available, and relatively cheap, the main thing I'm itching for is increased access and transfer speeds. Not just the controller speed as most hard drives still only maintain a constant transfer speed of 33Mbps. Theoretically, a denser drive at the same rotational speed will transfer data faster than a less dense drive, but will we see a dramatic improvement in sustained transfer speeds? While this transfer speed is acceptable while watching a DivX movie, it's really a pain while ripping a DivX movie. (A movie that I shot in my backyard, and authored, and own the rights to, and am ripping for the pure exitement as I would never violate a copyright.)

  3. Re:Increased Reliability? by l810c · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Not to mention backing up that data. Why does backup technology lag so far behind drive technology? 100+ CDR's to backup the typical Hard Drive in today's systems. 25 DVD's, but still WAY too much. A tape sytems to backup the typical hard dirve in a reasonable amount of time costs in the thousands.

    I'd like to see Redundancy And Speed hit the consumer market more than the current volume. RAID 0+1 should be standard in at least mid level systems.

  4. Re:a shame then by James_G · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I just stopped on the way home and did some photo shooting. I took 57 photos in about an hour. At 7.2MB per shot, that amounts to ~414MB of files from just an hour of shooting.

    Post-editting results in TIFF files that are approximately 10MB in size. All told, this one shoot now occupies over 800MB on my fileserver - from just one hour of shooting.

    Oddly enough, people do in fact use vast amounts of storage space for reasons other than sharing mp3s and movies. As technologies improve (cameras increase resolution, video cameras likewise, millions of other reasons), the demand for space will increase as it always has done.