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."

Comments

Re:Drive Heat

[imsabbel]

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...

sterically hindered polymer

[bodrell]

For those who failed chemistry . . .
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.

Re:sterically hindered polymer

[bodrell]

Well, I bet there are a lot of people who've never failed chemistry who didn't know what a sterically hindered polyester is. I'm also sure that there are a ton of smart chemistry students who, thanks to your pedantic "explanation" are no wiser.

I hope that you don't plan to teach chemistry to anyone who doesn't already know it. Not everyone has studied organic chemistry.

(I didn't write the above comment; just trying to keep the thread from getting too deep)
Sorry, but anyone who studied (and passed) chemistry ought to know what steric hindrance is. If you're having trouble with my vocabulary, then I'll try to clarify.

Steric: having to do with space. As in, "I was unable to fit my couch in the Honda Civic due to steric hindrance."
Polymer: A molecule composed of three or more repeating units. This can be a heteropolymer (more than one type of repeating unit) or a homopolymer (only one type of repeating unit). The repeating unit is called a monomer, and often has an antiquated name. For example, ethylene is the antiquated name of ethene, a two-carbon hydrocarbon with a double bond between carbons. However, polyethylene has no double bonds (because the bonds opened during the polymerization).
Moiety: A part of a molecule that has a particular functionality. For example, the amino acids each have three moieties: the amino part, the acid part, and the side-group. For proline the amino part is the side group also. Functional groups (amines, esters, acids, alcohols, etc.) are all moieties.

Are we clear now? Or is that still too pedantic? BTW, I'm not a teacher and don't plan on being one in the near future. There are different levels of understanding of any subject. Just because some people don't know what a molecule is doesn't mean I should define every term when I mention them. To quote H. L. Mencken, "Those who can, do; those who can't, teach."

Re:What's changed?

[Tlosk]

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.

Re:Great, but...

[DarkMan]

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.

in another case of "the blind leading the blind"

[Roman_(ajvvs)]

If a HDD is using micro-magnets to read/write from the platter, wouldn't the presence of a (relatively) giant magnet in the middle of the platter, bounce other magnetic bits around to such a degree that you'd either require a larger, unusable inner section of the platter, or lose the ability to use magnetic methods of storing data on the platter?

I can imagine a magnetically floating CD-ROM drive though, since optical systems aren't (measurably) affected by magnetism.