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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."
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...
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.
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.
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