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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."
Far greater than faster drives, of course, would be drives with no moving parts.
No wear, faster transfer (no seek time!) and silent. Should this be the way research should be going?
Patriotism - the last resort of scoundrels.
The first twenty posts for this article should prove as valuable for marketing research of slashdot readership. You should be posting pornography, not links to tech articles. Yes, I'm kind of joking but kind of not.
I swear most slashdot readers must either be 15, or never have sex. Once someone uses the word lubricants, everyone gets giddy...
Granted, I've not kept up on the intricate details of hard disk manufacture, but I recall that the drive heads were suspended above the physical media by a thin layer of air. Has that changed? What's the point of lubricating the disk surfaces if the heads don't touch them.
Article X: The powers not delegated... by the Constitution...are reserved...to the people
And hard drive speed does matter, a huge amount. Unless you have a crapload of RAM and everything you use is cached, 90% of the time you spend waiting for programs to start up or large files to be read is waiting for the HD to read the data. A faster HD can make a computer feel much snappier than a slow one.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
User data needs will always increase.
I remember spending a boatload of cash on a 4GB drive about 6 or 7 years ago thinking that would be more than enough storage for at least the next decade.
I've now got a 160GB boot drive and 1/2 TB array for storing media files (DV video, music, photos, etc).
I don't think it will be too much longer before people stop keeping physical files in the home, and instead scan all of their receipts, bills and statements as scanned images on their computers.
If you think video takes up a lot of space now, wait until all consumer electronics use HD video and storage needs increase by 4x.
Article X: The powers not delegated... by the Constitution...are reserved...to the people
That I am reading this right after I reinstalled a new harrdrive on my Notebook where after 2 1/2 years the IBM Travelstar died on me. So in in an other 2 1/2 years these drives will be available for my next replacement. Still I wish I had the option to at least raid 1 my laptop. Even it it does add weight and uses more battery.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Hard drives are pathetically slow. A seek takes 10 milliseconds, that's a factor of almost a million slower than a random memory access. The biggest noticeable delays (boot up time, firefox load time, open office load time, etc.) are all caused by the slow hard disk. Transfer speeds, which are now approaching 50MB/sec, are good enough. And size is still going up: two years ago 120 GB, one year ago 250 GB, this year 400 GB. No sign of slowing.
Fortunately, this is computer hardware we're talking about - most of it becomes obsolete or suffers a catastrophic failure before it simply wears out.
my sig's at the bottom of the page.
"I swear most slashdot readers must either be 15, or never have sex. Once someone uses the word lubricants, everyone gets giddy... "
Giddy? Nah. I see a bunch of people trying to be a comedian, though.
"Derp de derp."
With my hard drive luck, a year seems like a "longer lasting" drive. I've lost more hard drives in the last year than ever - Just being away on vacation (with the computers unplugged), I lost 2 hard drives! (not a complete loss, but the systems acted funny enough that I suspected total failure if I didn't replace the drives quickly)
One week of being off, for a drive that is not used 24x7, should not kill a drive. I've had drives sitting on a shelf for a year that still work fine. I should not need to setup a 3-drive RAID array simply to get the level of reliability we had a few years ago.
I use Macs to up my productivity, so up yours Microsoft!
But will they make it to market before memory cards [slashdot.org] large enough and cheap enough to feasibly replace hard drives altogether do?
Why the assumption that we have one or the other? The history of computing is one of a lengthening memory pyramid. It used to be just RAM and nonvolatile storage. Now we have three levels of cache on top of that. Now (excepting certain bits of bloatware *cough cough*) operating systems are not growing in size at the same rate as storage technology. I still have trouble filling more than a gigabyte or two on a basic Linux install. Why not have a situation where OS and core applications are stored on solid-state memory chips (say 10 G), while all the media that people are so fond of can end up on your mega hard-drive? That way you get the benefit of both: snappy load times for executable code, and near-unlimited, low-cost storage for all your media.
Lubricants and "Faster, Longer Lasting hard drives."
Seeing as how a lot of them will be stuffed full of porn, it seems somehow appropriate.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
You've hit upon a deep philosophical point. All that information is, is the location of things. Computation is moving things around.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
The OP may be right, but so is the Grandparent. Hard drives don't consume a lot of energy, so in a second, they simply can't generate more than 5W of heat, due to the whole "conservation of energy" thing. However, since hard drives don't put out a lot of heat, there's not a lot of effort to cool them, and they can build up heat to be hotter than other components, making the OP correct too. Without more info though, it's hard to say who's right.
In the absence of growing markets (if tarrif wars were to isolate national economies from foreign trade for example) nobody could afford to build those billion dollar fabs, but we would still have advancing technology. So the OP got it half-right.
And of course the yet-undiscovered low-cost future technology has to exist. Fields outside electronics have had growing markets drive technological and capital investment, but they haven't advanced as fast.
But the laws of supply and demand only kick in when the supply is constrained. In the case of a non-constrained supply, then what happens is the manufacturer will set the price so that the (sell price - manufacturing cost) * units sold equals is maximized (maximum total profit). Then the manufacture will make as many as will sell at that price.
Now, in this case, there is another economic force at play. It is the laws of economy of scale. So, as demand increases, more will be manufactured, allowing cheaper production costs, which will allow the sell price to drop, assuming that a lower sell price will increase the "quantity demanded" at that demand level enought to cause enough more units to sell to create a higher profit.
While the GP's post may have had a bit of a "look how much I know" feel to it, I suspect that your reaction to his use of "jargon" which with you are not familiar is an emotional rather than rational one. We always feel stupid when people speak to us about subjects we know little about (relative to them) as if "everyone understands it". Anyone who has ever been exposed to experts in a field other than their own has experienced this.
But as a mathematician, I understand that to properly express a problem, one must develop a language to describe it. To put this in CS terms, someone once said that if you lay out your data structures correctly, algorithms just fall into place, and that your code practically writes itself. The catch is, designing good data structures is no small feat, and much thought goes into it, and understanding the motivation is not always easy if you aren't really familiar with the problem.
In Math, we often joke (in a haha only serious kind of way) that our discipline is more linguistic than anything else. In a sense, math is simply "jargon", which as far as I can tell is the term used by laypeople threatened by big words for terminology with which they aren't familiar. There's really not much more to it than that; arrange your definitions properly, word them carefully, and the proofs just come.
Chemistry, physics, biology, and even sciences such as sociology and psychology all do the same sorts of things. I took o-chem in school and we used the term steric hinderance a lot, but the term "moiety" I either never learned or didn't remember. So I looked it up.
If the GP had been piling layer upon layer of complexity into his post, forcing the reader to master advanced organic chemistry concepts before being able to understand what he meant, I think he could rightly be accused of jargonism. But here, he used three or four terms with which you might be unfamiliar, all of which are trivial to look up.
I would have expected that a culture (slashdot) so connected to RTFM and CS, which probably has more technical jargon than any other scientific discipline, would know how to look up a few terms outside of their field.
Instead, you just bitch. Learning is a two way street, you know. You actually have to make an effort sometimes. Now you know what steric hinderance is. You've learned something, and if he hadn't used the term, you wouldn't know. This is not bad. You should thank him.