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IBM Introduces 'Air Bags' For Laptop Hard Drives
Ruger writes "Reported in PCWorld this morning, IBM has introduced a technology for their new laptop hard discs which has a similar concept to airbags in cars. Active Protection System (APS) is a microchip put on the system board that senses acceleration. It parks the head of a hard drive inside a tenth of a second, significantly reducing the risk of damage to data. IBM also has a a press release on the new ThinkPad R50 and T41 models that include this technology, for those interested in the company line."
seatbelts? Bet they hadn't though of that.
*goes off to patent it*
I have over 70 freaks, do you?
This is only good for "Air Heads" who move their laptop while it's on.
Fatality rate among children riding in front seat with laptops doubles.
Sigs? We don't need no stinking sigs!
when it can also detect incoming hammer blows and deflect them aside kung-fu style.
Also, adding further encouragement for me to throw my notebook across the room is the LAST think they need to do.
lysergically yours
This could be especially useful for, say, an iPod.
Improving durability of laptops is more important than kicking up clock speed or what have you, at least to the truly mobile user. Especially good would be if that durability could be made cheaper.
Something I've always found strange is that laptop carrying cases don't ever seem to advertise how well they PROTECT the laptop, which should be their primary goal, IMO. After having to go through great lengths to repair a new and expensive laptop after a drop, I'd be very appreciative of a carrying case that had this important end in mind.
The safest way to approach lava is to have another person with you and he goes first.
..pix of the crash test dummies when they smash the laptops into walls at 40 mph..
"You lied to me! There is a Swansea!"
I had an old laptop (486 33Mhz) once, and the hard drive door on it was broken... and all that held the hard drive in was hard friction pretty much, and a little button that didn't always work.
:p
Needless to say, a hard jab could disconnect the hard drive, and even have it fall out of the laptop.
The HD failed eventually... but after many a trips to the floor! Only hit concrete a few times, mostly hit carpet. When it failed it was just sitting there, but I guess it couldn't take the abuse
You have been playing the latest and greatest video game for a few hours when you make a mistake and pound the keyboard. The hardrives senses it and locks you down without saving. Whoops.
upgrade here, at the 'build your own' IBM laptop part of the website.
I have over 70 freaks, do you?
I hope this thing isn't too sensitive - it would be quite annoying if a bumpy car ride or turbulence on an airplane would interrupt any hard drive activity...
-- Dr. Eldarion --
Hm, if only there was something where it would switch to a backup battery for the harddrive to spin down, so that you don't have to fsck if you use ext2, That would be something I wouldn't mind purchasing.
Can they create an air for when Windows crashes? I'd like my computer to be safe from those too!
The Blaster Master Fighting for Truth, Justice, and Evil Pie since 1979
Will soon appear under an LED on the new Thinkpad's keyboard.
Without having to take the drive to an Intel garage.
So you mean that if I cause a traffic accident while coding, this will keep me from losing my data even when my brains splatter across the windshield? Cool...
I can see how this would help if you dropped it from a table, or your briefcase, but what do they have to help the laptop that reaches its terminal velocity? It's not accelerating, so it'll unlock the drive, and then SLAM! your data's gone! Skydiving with a satellite connection may not be popular at IBM, but hey, think of the rest of us, you insensitive clod!
There's a 68.71% chance you're right.
how many Laptop Harddisks have been damaged due this very specific problem of the head not being parked(?).during a deacceleration. Does it add any mechanical stability to the harddisk ? What if the hard disk breaks in two pieces ?
for the last time people, I am "frodo from middle eaRTH", not "middle eaST".
...does a laptop hard drive have to accelerate until data loss/corruption occurs? I have a laptop, and I routinely carry it around my house, and the only thing I've noticed when I'm carrying it is the DVD drive if it's spinning at full/normal speed, the drive makes scratchy/unbalanced noises.
Obviously, I'm typing this now on my laptop, and nothing is wrong. I've never broken anything carrying it around. I've also used my laptop while in the car, and my parent's jerky driving doesn't cause any problems.
How much acceleration is necessary for problems to occur??
Topics > Systems > Notebooks >
IBM Updates ThinkPads
New notebooks feature built-in hard drive protection.
Tom Sullivan, InfoWorld.com
Monday, October 06, 2003
IBM on Monday is adding two systems to its ThinkPad roster of notebooks and boosting the capabilities of several others.
Big Blue is releasing the R50 and T41 models, both of which come with a new Active Protection System that is designed to better protect hard drives.
Comparing APS to automobile air bags, IBM officials explained that the system can detect sudden motion--such as the notebook being dropped or jerked because of a kicked power cord--and react by stabilizing the head of the hard drive.
"APS is a microchip that we put on the system board that senses acceleration. It parks the head of a hard drive inside a tenth of a second. You get four times greater impact with APS than you do without it," said Joe Doria, manager of IBM's ThinkPad product line.
Doria added that APS will protect the data in a hard drive, and IBM hopes it will reduce downtime and support costs.
Additional Details
In addition to APS, the R50 is available in 14- and 15-inch models. The systems weigh in at fewer than 6 pounds, and IBM claims are capable of a battery life reaching nearly 10 hours.
Customers can elect to use the Intel Centrino chip in the R50 and T41 notebooks, Doria said, as well as integrated 802.11 a/b/g wireless functionality.
Big Blue also upgraded the X31, R40, R40e, and G40 models with faster processors and integrated wireless technology.
--Just mod this down if not needed as the server is fine
Does anyone know of a laptop that can run while closed (warwalking), has SXGA or better resolution, is reasonable light, and doesn't rely on centrino or other non-Linux garbage?
On a relevant enote, it might be worthwhile for them to toss solid-state storage on the motherboard through a usb interface. 256mB wouldn't significantly add to costs, but could garuntee that important data would survive.
I suspect that the majority of damaged files on laptops occurs as a result of power failures rather than as a result of laptop frizbee.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
Interestingly enough, Connor came out with a disk drive 6 months later that did something similar, but it just cut write current rather than park the heads.
Even at under a tenth of a second, if it senses acceleration (you drop it) and the heads are in the process of moving across the platter to the park position at impact (it hits the floor), wouldn't that increase the chances of a large scratch as opposed to a small nick?
666-607: 6th floor apartment of the beast
"You get four times greater impact with APS than you do without it,"
!!!!!!
I'm guessing he meant it can survive impacts up to four times as strong, or four times as many impacts.
But I'm also wondering how true that is. A 10th of a second seems awfully slow...
I don't see how this will prevent head injuries for laptop users.
an ill wind that blows no good
"Real" cup holders??
When I was moving, I shipped my computer to the new address and when I tried to boot up my computer at the new location, it made a cranky noise and did not work. I lost all my mp3s that I collected right from the days of napster :(
I think the vibrations and shocks that the machine gets during the journey are a little too intense for the hard-disk to handle and thus, this Air-bag idea sound good to me. But, hey, I'm not the type who pays a price equal to the price of the disk itself for the air-bag. So, they better make it inexpensive.
New year Resolution: Don't change sig this year
When my computer crashes, at least I'll have something soft to protect my head from banging it in frustration.
The only similiarity is that it uses an accelerometer as a trigger to park the head.
But it is an analogy that will probably stick because it is easy to visualize, even if it is wrong.
Dogma - "let's just say we'd like to avoid any empirical entanglements."
Who gives a shit about the hard drives, did you hear about the battery life that these bitches were supposedly putting out? 10 hours? That's unreal. Granted, the hard drive improvements are great, but you can't beat 10 hour battery life.
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you sound like Al Gore
tech support:sir, this hard drive is not recomended for use on airplanes, fast cars, or trains.We do not recommend traveling at all with any laptop with this setup.
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Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Does that seem a little slow to anyone else? If, to use the example in the article, I were to trip on the power cord thereby rapidly accelerating the computer, it seems like the damage would be done in less than 1/10th of a second. Also, it would be nice to see what kind of acceleration is needed for this system to activate - if I just drop it, will the relatively low 1G of acceleration cause the system to activate, or will it wait to try to activate until the laptop hits the floor (at which point the laptop stops in what I would guess is considerably less than a tenth of a second). 1G acceleration seems like a rather low threshold, and 1/10 of a second too slow a response if a higher threshold were to be used.
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I've already lost 2 Travelstar's and 2 Deskstar's to IBM's poor manufacturing of hard drives..
Let's hope this will change things for the better.. and create, for once, reliability
"The ones who dont do anything are always the ones who try to pull you down" -- Henry Rollins
Parks the head in a safe place?
:)
How about Turtle Tech! Catchy, no? Then how about TPS (Turtle Protection System)?
Linux can have a penguin, Ibm can have a turtle!
Interesting that Apple has the patent on this
Makes me think of the cartoon showing when "the network crashes".
Everyone yells out obscenities, and then the air bags deploy from the monitors.
Wish I had a link to it...
USB or external keyboard + hard drive & you should be good to go!
I'm not sure if this is still the case with IBM laptops today but my A20m had some really nasty overheating issues.
The way it cools the CPU is via a tiny horizontaly mounted fan and a heatpipe running through a big aluminum block...which did virtualy nothing.
Worse yet it was fairly common for that fan system to die. There was a controller card which regulated the fan based on the CPU temptriture. In my laptop that part failed three times during 2 years. Worse yet the ONLY way to fix it is to replace the mothereboard, $400 (the fan itself which can die is $50).
I personaly find it odd that they're so concerend with HDs. I dropped that very same laptop numerous times and that never resulted in a damaged HD or even damaged plastic. (I can't say the same about Dell laptops)
10 Hour battery life on the other hand is something I'm curious about.
Also another HUGE weakness IMO are ports.
Like keyboard, network, USB etc. On a PC those ports are used maybe 10 times a year, on a laptop several times a day, at times roughly.
My current laptop can't play any sound because the 'sound out' port is broken (it's all made of plastic, cord got yanked sideways and the plug just shattered). A friend of mine has a useless laptop because the ethernet jack is broken. I have seen plenty of dell and IBM laptops where the powercable refuses to stay in.
Personaly I'm baffled how the designers didn't see these issues comming.
Fact is the laptops are NOT used gently for more than the first few days. Then they get tossed about and "ripped out" of networks at the end of a long day.
In Soviet Russia, the television watches YOU!
Why are you wasting time posting? SUE!!!!!!!!!!!
If you're dropping a laptop, odds are you've more to worry about than just the hard drive. No? ;)
--<Mike>--
Active Protection System (APS) is a microchip put on the system board that senses acceleration.
What about decceleration? Like the sudden stop of hitting the pavement.
I have worked on hard drives and shock sensors. The retract time is far longer than the impact time. The impact of hitting the floor will be over in milliseconds. In that time, the heads will not even reach the ramp.
The only thing that would offer real protection is to sense the 0 G condition when the computer is falling. It cost bucks to be sensitive enough to sense 0 G. It costs more bucks than anyone is willing to put into a mobo.
Religion is the main cause of atheism.
Air bags have explosives in them!
The honorable Senator Orrin Hatch should be interested in the project as it might help realize his dreams of exploding computers. You could use the explosives to save the disk when it is accelerated, or to blow up the computer when a copyright holder presses the self destruct.
BTW, if they really are like airbags, the devices can only be used once. However, what realy matters with analogies in business press releases is to make investors think of other market successes, and not really about the product.
I want the laptop to sense when I've dropped it and deploy *external* airbags to absorb the impact. Now that would be cool. Plus, you could use it as a pillow the next time your flight is delayed for 17 hours.
your airbags have been deployed, therefore you must have dropped the unit, which isn't covered by the warranty. but at least you have your data
What I really need is a microchip in my mouth which detects my foot approaching and can park my tongue in 1/10th of a second.
"Life has improved immeasurably since I have been forced to stop taking it seriously." - Hunter S. Thompson
The point is that we have become accustomed to absurdly short battery life in devices which are supposed to be portable.
See what I've been reading.
They did something innovative with parking on their deskstar HDs, where instead of the head hitting a landing zone on the disk it would exit off the side off the disk and park and then carefully come back in place when it was un-parked. Unfortunately the deskstar series had some major problems with HDs failing all over the place.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
According to this article at Techweb, the head park time was not "specified" in IDE drives, so they had to get drive manufacturers to meet their 200-300 millisecond requirement...
Thats a little slower than a 1/10 of a second.
...here comes the PARK command all over again You know, it's that little program from, well, around 1987 that parked a laptop's hard drive? Sounds like history's coming full circle.
SNACKS ARE AWESOME
Don't bump the computer, I've got a CD burning and if the hard drive locks it'll messup the throughput.
I was trying to figure out what the legal status on this would be. Technically, when they close a disclosure like this, it officially means IBM has no interest in the idea and I am free to do whatever I want with the idea (subject to no compete limitations). However, since I didn't do anything with the idea (publicly dislose it, patent it or whatever), IBM or any other company was free to reinvent it and do whatever they wanted with it.
So, no grounds for sueing them. But I bet my personel file mysteriously disappears. :)
That's the ticket! Why fuck around with pansie volvo airbags, when we can have the laptop call up satellite maps, figure out how far to the floor, and fire its RETRO ROCKETS!
There are also a least a few time a year where an aircraft hits turbulance and looses 40,000 feet in seconds, and then coming to a jarring stop before gaining altitude again. Imagine overhead and underseat compartments exploding.
-- Snip --
Um, dude - if a plane drops 40,000 feet in seconds, it will not be gaining altitude again and you won't have to worry about overhead and underseat compartments exploding - just whether you dotted the "i"s and crossed the "t"s in your will...
(See the last paragraph of this press release regarding the Boeing 737-800 - that is, an aircraft whose maximum cruising altitude is 41,000'.)
Did you read the article? It's not an actual inflating airbag that explodes, it's merely a comparison to an airbag. All the happens is the drive heads are stabilized to prevent a head crash.
There are also a least a few time a year where an aircraft hits turbulance and looses 40,000 feet in seconds, and then coming to a jarring stop before gaining altitude again. Imagine overhead and underseat compartments exploding.
Given that the speed of sound is roughly 1000 ft/sec, your plane would be doing what... Mach 8-10 in that turbulence? And given that most aircraft cruise at 30,000-35,000 ft, I would suspect that the jarring stop is from the plane hitting the ground.
asidu ;sodfijg; soid
I'm writing this on a Compaq Armada 1750. I upgraded mine to 320MB RAM, PIII 600MHz, and 40GB drive. It's got 2 type-II cardbus slots, your standard PC ports, a trackpad, nice keyboard, and a beautiful 1024x768 14.1" Active LCD. It runs linux REALLY well (just don't use ACPI if you want it to cool itself), and WinXP is actually pretty fast on it as well. You can swap out the hard drive (on it's own removable chassis) quite easily to switch from Linux to Windows to whatever drives. DVD-ROM and floppy at the same time (or extra battery instead of the floppy) for full desktop-replacement. I'm looking for a DVD-ROM/CD-RW module that will fit the front bezel, but that's another story.
Did I mention that this thing is a total BEAST? You can toss it across the room and it still runs. I run mine in my car (no shocks, mind you) for MP3s. It's no lightweight, but it's built to last, not to carry.
These can be had on eBay for about $250, mine would go for about $600 because of all the 'leet upgrades.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
Wow, I thought that all of Connor's drives just parked the heads right in the middle of writing, smack in the middle of the platter.
*ZZZEEERERRRRRTT*
"If it's a Connor, It's a goner."
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
I had a IBM Deskstar 75GXP and 60GXP fail on me, and believe me, I will never, EVER use another IBM hard drive. They gave me a hard time during the replacement process, and they never offered to recover my data. My productivity went into negative numbers as soon as my hard drives started making the click-bzzp of death (CBOP).
DON'T BUY IBM HARD DRIVES!!!!!!!!!!
What happens if your kid drops the laptop and the airbag deploys and suffocates him?
asdfh asldf hasil;dfh asdf;aisd
> Active Protection System (APS) is a microchip put on the system board that senses acceleration. It parks the head of a hard drive inside a tenth of a second, significantly reducing the risk of damage to data.
Is this for those people that refer to themselves as having "big hands"? Cuz I sure as heck never had any data damage from normal use of any of my notebooks, and I've owned a few. Of course, I never dropped any of them while they were running. I guess it would be worthwhile for the data to be safe even if the rest of the notebook break. But then what if the chip goes berzerk and parks your heads constantly, dropping thruput to the 21st-century equiv of a 2400 bps modem? <g>
Must-not-watch TV!
It's good that this tech is coming down the line, but why in the hell is it going on the MOTHERBOARD instead of in the hard drive electronics where it belongs?!!?
The answer, is, of course that if they keep it out of the HDD's then nobody else will be able to easily integrate the feature into their own notebooks.. Great for IBM selling thinkpads. Shitty for the consumer.
Bah.
Much better would be to trigger when it's in freefall. When you're sitting on a desk, you feel 1G acceleration up. (Gravity is indistinguishable from acceleration, according to relativity.) So the laptop can detect when it's in free-fall, and park the heads. A reaction time of .1s allows it to fall (1/2)g*t^2 = 5cm. A drop of less than 5cm is unlikely to cause significant damage anyway.
Of course, maybe this is what they're doing all along. The article wasn't very specific.
Panasonic Toughbook notebooks [http://www.panasonic.com/computer/notebook/] have had an impact absorbing gel around their hard drives for more than five years. Not as fancy as IBM's solution, but the U.S. Armed Forces (especially the Marines) and police departments have been using them and seem to like them. The Toughbooks also come with a magnesium alloy case and re-inforced LCD, all at about the same cost as a normal notebook.
IBM seems to be suffering under the delusion that the complicated solution is the best. Nothing new for them I realize, but haven't they heard of K.I.S.S.???
Am I correct to assume that the disk heads are parked anyway when the Laptop goes to sleep mode?
So what is the probability of dropping a laptop *while using it* ?!?
Is this really significant when compared to the probability of a deskstar/travelstar failure without external influence?
I work providing technical support to at least 1000 people on campus, and lately (over the past two years), I've been seeing a LOT of hard drive failures. Most don't seem to be from people mistreating their laptops by shaking, dropping, banging, etc. Many of the computers never even move away from the desks that they sit on. I fail to understand why they are investing in air bags as opposed to making their hard drives more reliable in the first place. Don't get me wrong...I think this is a great idea, but I think their energy would be better spent in improving the quality of the hard drives themselves.
Wait until I tell her that this very same morning IBM announced laptop airbags! OK, just for the hard drive, but still. I bet she'll get a kick out of that. Well, actually, probably not, given her plight.
I wondered years ago what happened to my wonderful park.com command in DOS. Apparently, when harddrive technology improved, some higher-up (Microsoft) decided that no one would ever want (or need?) to park their harddrive again.
This is just ridiculous. Just because I don't NEED to park my harddrive when I take my desktop in the car, doesn't mean I don't WANT to park my harddrive when I ship it internationally!
Maybe the standard harddrive can't be parked anymore (less expensive), which makes a lot of sense. But if it still has the physical capability, why not let me control that?
have the people at ibm as well as other laptop manufactures sorted out the "kink" where laptops would overheat causing burns to the groin area of a user? granted it does not happen often, but its still a concern.
sig censored by america
I use a (now) old IBM Thinkpad T-22, but any of the T-Series can be set to run normally in a "closed" position. They weigh in between 4 and 5 lbs, and can be purchased with very nice 1400x1050 screens. They're not insanely expensive, either, unless you have to have the absolute latest and greatest model. Some do have Centrino, but you can also buy them with IBM's 802.11a/b/g solution. Thinkpads have typically handled Linux extremely well (mine does, anyway).
Help save the critically endangered Blue Iguana
Every now and then IBM manages to pull a trick that places them where they are 'loved' the most and are liked to be seen as being in the right place. Reference grade quality IT engineering and products. Be it the portable PS/2s with plasma screen, the PS/2 Note (iirc the 1st Notebook), the Thinkpad series, the microdrive and now this. They never try to go over the top. There is nothing really exceptionally spectacular about their ideas, but they allways manage to implement them in a way that it becomes a benchmark in functionality, is a reference for quality and has a price that people who can afford it are willing to pay and those who can't wish they could afford it. It's interresting the way IBM is an IT company that people are actually refering to as a 'traditional' one.
Makes stuff like that Mickeysoft company attempting to project 'cool' image even so much more silly.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I still think that the age of metallic/glass discs spinning at high-speed with a metallic coating to save data, is rapidly coming to an end.
Just wait... in 15 years, it'll all be RAM or 'thin clients' that we download over our exabit WiFi Internet connections by then.
this is offtopic. i attached the reply to wrong topic. i had two browser windows open with different slashdot articles. sorry.
...I want a bridle for my keyboard.
MARES RULE!
(Doh) Teach me to not RTFA. To quote Natalie Natella: Nevermind.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
apple had pattented this technology about 3 years ago, i read this thru surfing spawned by an article on slashdot. I saw a list of all the silly patents that apple has made (like the icons in os X) not sure if they impliment it however.
The real problem with laptops is HEAT which has killed more of my laptops than fallng off the car seat. This, an operator error, not a design defect. Do some research IBM. Now that laptops and refrigerators cost about the same and once someone has a house, refrigerator, and transport, a TV or computer will be their next purchase. Computer purchase occurs before climate control purchase for MOST of the words population and the damn things are only good to 35C according to spec and this only for booting and minilmal functionality. Send the damn market research guys to Samoa for a month!
"Reuters"
In later news,
IBM's R&D secret lab dubbed "The Think Tank" has finally opened it's doors to the press!
Inside, some of it's newest creations include the mythical laptop with parachute that opens opon impact - parachute sold seperatly - and a laptop with new casing made of "silly puddy (tm)" which one scientist was quoted as saying "It doesn't just bounce..
It bounces back!"
Although results seemed surprisingly mixed - where one laptop didn't just break, it exploded - for seemingly no apparent reason at all. Then as one tech. pulling bits of glass shards from his alarmingly bulbous head jokingly smiled and started chanting "It's think I can, I think I can!" to which all the other techs inexplicably joined in. 30 mins later they were still chanting.
While leaving the secret lab several more unexplained explosions occured - each more threatening than the next - but I felt safe. Safe with the knowledge that the world was safer, laptops were safer because before this experience I thought I could and now I think I can.
-The Brokman report -
Water cooling, Airbags, what next? See-through windows?
Oh wait...
t'nera semordnilap
So now you get a giant scratch across all tracks, rather than just in one place on one track.
What about deceleration? Like the sudden stop of hitting the pavement.
It's just acceleration with a new reference.
As far at the APS is concerned, being dropped in the pavement and abruptly stopping is the same as the pavement jumping up and abruptly pushing the laptop into motion. (of course It can't predict either situation, only that something has changed and something might change again very soon)
or is this a useless innovation for 99% of laptop users out there? In my experience, I've seen laptops beaten, melted, drop-kicked, hosed down, and generally misused. And every time the hard drive has been none the worse for wear. What ALWAYS gives up the ghost is the screen. Without fail.It either cracks, fails to work entirely or fades.
Can we get IBM to put a little R&D towards making those a little heartier first?
Many Thanks,
Luke
Yes, my grammar is not impeccable. Ambiguity was present in my previous post. I think I got my meaning across though, and the meaning is what matters.
P.S. Again, fuck you.
I actually DID read the article. All it does is park the head safely - it says nothing about shutting down the system. Presumably a short time after the acceleration has stopped the hard drive will return to its regular operating mode. I.e. for your average day to day task, you probably won't notice a thing! Your movie might pause for a second, or your filesystem access take a little longer, but by and large it should be unnoticeable.
It's a great idea. Now, if only IBM would come up with a way to raise a shield over the LCD moments before it gets hit by a flying bottle... =)
wish they had this for the infamous deathstar line.......my drive's so dead that elvis is lively (may he RIP btw)
it will definitely teach you to keep relaxed, even if you make a mistake. it should save you quite a lot of money on keyboards.
Conservatism: The fear that somewhere, somehow, someone you think is your inferior is being treated as your equal.
Yes you're right! If you're into rugged survivable notebooks you're definitely into IBM Thinkpads! You know, I keep on dropping mobile phones and notebooks all the time.
I've tripped over the powerchord of my IBM Thinkpad T40 a couple of times now (I sometimes work at the couch table and then forget I've got it plugged in) and each time it really crashed hard onto our stone tile floor.
Tell you what... My wife bitched about the stone floor, the Thinkpads works perfectly and obviously takes a lot more abuse than our flooring!
And it parks the head in one-tenths of a second too. Come to think of it, how fast does sound travel in plastic? Does it go from one corner of the laptop to the harddisk in more than one tenth of a second? I thought sound travels in solids faster than in gas.
Much more useful would be to flatten the head more and add structures around it to not damage the platter. This will make the head heavy and slow. So they can add two or more seperate heads in the same structure. More expensive, but good technology does not come cheap.
I've always wondered if someone has made a laptop with solidstate IDE disks, maybe compactflash, or at least the microdrive.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
my iBook's firmware crashes (reset time and everything) if it's left closed while running for a few minutes. Later iBooks don't have this firmware bug, but the heat from the hard drive warps the screen.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.