Next Wave Of Hard Drive Tech: Perpendicular Recording

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."

Comments

How exactly...

[PakProtector]

...will this affect me? How much extra storage will this give me on the same number and size of platters?

hmmm

[cybercuzco]

Maybe I'm just stupid, but could somone please explain how "standing the bits on end" works? Isnt this just the same as making the bits smaller (so that they are deeper than they are wide) And how is this an advance? I would think that multiple layers would be more perpendicular, since the only thing that can be written in a direction perpendicular to the circle(that isnt also a circle) would be up or down.

Forget capacity, we want speed

[AsmordeanX]

So instead of taking 40 minutes to transfer the contents of one 80GB drive, it will now take 8 hours but you will have 1TB of space. Woo

I have an idea that could change the Hard Drive...

[zymano]

but i can't share it. It would lower energy consumption and increase speeds by 500 % . I don't know if it can be pantented. I may try.

Re:a shame then

[56ksucks]

It doesn't only effect the large capacity hard drive market. High speed internet, Blank DVD's and CD's, CD and DVD Burners, Portable MP3 Players would also suffer. Why carry an MP3 player around if all you can play on it are MP3's you ripped from your own CD stash? You could just carry a walkman. Why have high speed internet if not to download things at high speed? Just to have a web site load 3 seconds faster? and blank CD's and DVD's just for backing up your hard drive, it'd take a whole pack of em, or for saving your huge folder full of word and excel files from work? Overkill! If that all it took to keep a media format alive we might still see the Zip drive going strong. These technologies are begging to be used for piracy. They thrive on piracy. They're designed to move and record large amounts of data, and who actually pays for this much data? Open source is free, but once you use it to download your favorite flavor of Linux and burn it to CD it'll just sit there until the next version comes out. These technologies thrive on getting large amounts of data at high speeds for free and saving it. If we stop being able to get large amounts of data for free then what else are we going to download at high speeds and save on CD and DVD, or our huge 250GB hard drives?