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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."
nyah
Lubricants and "Faster, Longer Lasting hard drives."
Sounds like some of the spam I get every day... cue all the bad jokes.
I am constantly bombarded about emails promising 'longer lasting hard drives' something about pills or herbs, this is nothing new.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
of this?
With this, my hard drive speed increased a lot, if you know what I mean, and I think you do!
However, I don't know about "longer lasting". I guess it depends on the person. Mine becomes a floppy after 2 minutes.
What are you selling? Hard drives or sex jelly?
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
"Hard". "Lubricant". "Faster". How the hell are the trolls supposed to twist this into a quick laugh? You guys are making it too difficult.
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.
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?
But will they make it to market before memory cards large enough and cheap enough to feasibly replace hard drives altogether do?
Art Schools Dietzilla
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.
This is not funny. We have very serious technology break-through, and you should not be laugh about "Hard drive", "lube-and-polyester, "etc."
I suggest you read Slashdot
The oddest materials pop up for load bearing duties.
"Felt bearings" have been used in the automotive industry for years.
Especially in rack and pinion steering system where lateral forces are not so high.
Lubricants for the felt material include oil and graphite powder, or run dry.
While more durable bearings such as needle roller, bronze sleeve, and teflon bushings, may be the preference of performance applications, ease of fitment, damping ability, and cost, still ensures felt bearings are used today, both in automotive and other industrial machinery. It is very possible, you have owned a car with one or moore felt bearings somewhere in the steering system.
The properties of synthetic material as a bearing surface have been used and far back as 1950's(and maybe beyond).
In post Patriot Act America, the library books scan you.
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
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
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.
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.
The women keep telling us 'size doesn't matter'.
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.
Yes, every girlfriend loves a speedy hard drive! After all, it allows her to perform everyday computing tasks, such as finding the MS Word document she's looking for or installing a new version of Quicken.
This new lubricant will allow the the hard disk to go faster because it will form an interface between the moving parts and the part of the head that touches them. The smooth, slippery, evenly-coated moving parts will slide much more easily against the head, prolonging its life.
Really, this is one magnificent technological achievement.
And to think, all the comments I've read so far have been pornographic innuendos made by "+1, Funny"-hording neanderthals. But your post, on the other hand....
I just re-read it. nevermind....
pi = 3.141592653589793helpimtrappedinauniversefactory7
Hmm. I've been using polyester based oils in my engines for a long time. So am I going to have to change my HDD oil every 3000 gigabytes or something?
I've often wondered about the rate of evaporation on fluid-bearing HDs. Running at high temperatures, even the lowest level of evaporation will mean a loss of lubricant over the years. Even inside the semi-sealed chamber of the drive, each on-off cycle will mean that the drive exhales the evaporated lubricant and the cooling pattern of a turned-off drive will mean condensation of lubricant on the inside shell of the case.
Ball-bearings (well-designed ones at least) can last virtually forever. I wonder if the same can be said for fluid bearings?
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
It is surprising how often improvements in our computer technology comes from relatively mundane sources. For example, much of the reason that Moore's Law has continued to hold is the way that the mechanical engineers have been able to constantly improve our ability to position things accurately. Masks and wafers must be positioned with astonishing (at least to me) accuracy relative to each other in order to allow creation of 90 nm features.
We have a winner ...
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.
One time, I was doing a crossword.
DI_K
12. Can be floppy or hard.
Couldn't make this sort of thing up if I tried.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
This story title doesn't use those exact words, but surely getting four sexual innuendos in any sort of casual sentence is a worthy accomplishment.
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.