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New Lubricant Leads To Faster Hard Drives
azav writes "We all know about Moore's Law as it applies to chip speed but little attention is publicly made to the challenges of increasing speed in hard drives. A recent discovery in polyester (yes, polyester, you disco baby) lubricants will allow for faster and longer lasting hard drives."
most likely your GPU or the end of the cpu heatpipe is there...
No current 2.5" HD needs more than 5W during normal usage, which is WAY lower than many other components...
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
Um, no moving parts does not translate to no wear. Your Pentium IV CPU will eventually let you down, even if you use it under ideal conditions. Granted, well-designed electronic components tend to be more reliable than mechanical components.
S-ATA, P-ATA or one of the multiple SCSI interfaces, all are not maxed out until you put multiple disks (and in S-ATA that is impossible, by design, P-ATA just sucks at that and the only worth naming is SCSI, that was designed with that in mind). The issue is the mechanical speed. For a single disk, all interfaces are faster than the platters and heads can read or write sequentially. Think about heads that can move quicker from one place to another and disks that turn faster, thus allowing to have better peak speed and also better real speed (non continous reads or writes). Of course, that requires better mechanical parts to avoid problems like vibrations or head crashes. Maybe the new lubricant could help with that.
The polymer used in this application is a sterically hindered polyester. An ester is a carboxylic acid with some sort of organic group replacing the hydrogen (i.e., O=C-O-CH3 is the methyl ester moiety).
Bulky groups sterically hinder a molecule, making part of the molecule inaccessible. One very common application is the sterically hindered base, like triethylamine. A normal amine is NH3, but a triethyl amine is N(CH3)3. The effect is that the compound raises a solution's pH, but cannot react with other functional groups easily. This helps prevent side reactions / biproducts.
t-BOC is one type of a sterically hindered protective group. Generally, protecting groups are removed as one of the final steps in order to get the desired product. This polyester has steric hindrance that protects the ester bond. But the article didn't say how that was accomplished. Adamantanes are another type of bulky group used to sterically hinder a molecule.
Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a soportar Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a espabilar
Ignore the other people who replied, I don't think they bothered to read the article. The lubricant on the disc surface is just to help protect it from damage (platters are already have a protective layer, but this new one has better characteristics at high speed and is simpler to apply because it doesn't require seperate adhesives).
The term lubricant probably wasn't the best choice, rather it's just a protective film.
Supposedly at the high RPMs of top of the line drives, the film currently used can ripple or even spin off entirely after prolonged usage which leaves the disc more vulnerable to head contact or armature resting.
WD-40's not a lubricant. It's a penetrant and water repellent.
http://www.momsanaladventure.com/
It comes from the Family Guy Y2K episode. There is a guy in a chicken suit handing out coupons, and the chicken tells Peter about Y2K. Peter replies with "What are you selling? Chicken or sex jelly?"
Beware, Nugget is watching... See?
Research is already there, RAMdrive products just need volume to become economical.
;).
Curtis SSD http://www.curtisssd.com/products/drives/ make solid state hard drives that appear as a SCSI hard drive. They're phenomenally fast, and I imagine phenomenally expensive.
However, they are of course volatile, so you need to stream your OS and data from a tape of HDD into cache before you boot the machine. And again, capacities are limited to ~15GB, so they're only of any real use as swap and/or database filesystems (possibly as root FS if you're looking for very snappy applications as well... hell, you could even RAID0 the bastards
As mentioned above, MRAM (non-volatile RAM with pretty much unlimited write, unlike flash based technologies) is an attempt to do away with the "load your OS before you boot" problem, but I don't think it'll appear in the consumer arena for awhile yet, and I imagine it'll be similarly priced to the Curtis drives today.
Moderation Total: -1 Troll, +3 Goat
Sheesh people, RTFLabel... From the label:
LUBRICATES Moving parts such as: Hinges Wheels Rollers Chains Gears
This is from a 10oz can label, located right under the Directions section. I know what you're saying about WD-40, but the lable advertises that it lubricates, thus why people consider it a lubricant.
Here (NZ) its called *twink* :)
Not meaning to be (overly) pedantic, but that's not wear. Wear is caused by bits rubbing over each other.
This is not just a semantic difference. The failure modes of silicon chips are mostly diffusion limited - that it, the metal conductors expand, the pn junctions become more diffuse, vacencies develop in the silicon, and so on. The failure mode of a part which wears is generally that the wear causes a mechanical weakness in a part till it breaks, bends, or is otherwise no longer functional.
This difference is reflected in the time to failure of different devices. Electronics show a bathtub curve - essentially, manufacturing defects show up in young failures, then after a period (around 8 - 10 months), there is no intrinsitic source of failure other than the (slow) diffusion limited modes, so there number of devices failing drop very low, until that mode dominates, at sometime around 8-10 years after manufacture.
Mechanical parts also show young failures, but, due to wearing, they do not last as long, and the rate of failures does not drop as low. The exact duration is determined by the type of use of the part. For example, this motor here *clunk* has bushes and brushes that have a design life of 1 months constant use, which translates to about 4 years with typical uses patterns. On the other hand, the motor in a washing machine is rated for something like 2 years constant use. The washing machine motor has bigger bushes and brushes, which are designed to last longer.
I could go on, but a) it gets boring rapidly, and b) I'd have to did out some notes on it, and cba.
In 10 years with computers, which gives experince with devices up to 20 years old, I have seen 1 case of failure in a componant over 3 months old that was not caused (directly or indirectly [0]) by mechanical wear.
Having said all that, Flash memory is not as reliable as most electronics, as it has a particular structure that causes insulator breakdown after around 1000 writes. But that's not _really_ wear, although I'm told it has a similar failure profile.
Not moving parts does not translate to no deterioration, but it _does_ mean no wear.
[0] Couple of times, power supply fans died, power supply overheats, fails, and frys electronics.
Australians also laugh when Europeans come over and start talking about routers, pronounced as rooters. For the same reason.
meh
"This is probably why the palm pilot does not have a replaceable battery."
OK. Now I'm gonna swear. Where the fuck did you pull that from?
Try running out of battery power on a palm VX (I know, older model - but you said "palm"). You lose all applications in memory.
Why? 'cause it's not "flash memory". It's actually something closer to SDRAM, which requires refresh charges every so often. Hence, if you run out of battery, you lose the memory. As well, it's not "ROM" if you can write to it.
Karnal
It is the actual platters that are made from a ceramic glass instead of metal. The glass has better thermal tolerance and is lighter and stronger than the previous metals used.
Article X: The powers not delegated... by the Constitution...are reserved...to the people
Check out these solid state HD's.
I'm sure there'll come the time when spinning disks (either floppy or HD) will come to an end and become just pieces of junk in a museum - like vacuum tubes in electronics.
I can imagine a magnetically floating CD-ROM drive though, since optical systems aren't (measurably) affected by magnetism.
click-clack, front and back. I'm not moving this car otherwise.
root = 'fuck' in Australia, so when an Aussie happens to mention the words 'mad rooter', they're not referring to a buggered up packet forwarder.
We Aussies also have a very different meaning for the word "fanny" than you do in the US.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.