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Shaking Hard Drives Instead of Spinning?
Twyko64 writes "A UK startup called Dataslide aims to develop 'hard drives' made of oscillating sheets of LCD-screen-like material with piezo-electronic actuators and many, many read:write heads. A 'hard drive' could be the same size and shape as an LCD screen. I wrote a this piece on Techworld about it."
Interesting concept, but I wonder how one would deal with the vibrations on this, data and moving parts never seems to work especially well.
Cue jokes about "shaken, not stirred..."
Man, a 20" hard drive.
That's not progress.
The Internet is full. Go Away!!!
I don't know about you lot, but my LCD monitor is an awful lot larger than my hard drive. Surely all those extra heads are going to be really expensive, too?
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
piezo-electronic actuators.
Which one? The one on my watch, the one on my cell phone, the one on my calculator, or the one on my laptop?
I hate grammar Nazi's.
does it work with Rez?
I wrote a this piece on Techworld about it.
That really makes me want to go read the article.
FORTUNE FAVORS IRONY
It seems to be wor
I've recently being doing a report for Physics on the Piezoelectric effect, and it is really interesting thing.
When you put a current through a piezoelectric material (e.g. Quartz), it vibrates. The oscillations are used to create sound in Ultrasound Transducers, and they are used in watches as a time measurement.
Conversely, if you mechanically compress a piezoelectric crystal, a charge will occur at the edges. This is used in Ultrasound to detect sound waves, in guitar pickups, and even in those cigarette lighters in cars.
You can read more about it at Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piezoelectric
Just thought this might interest someone.
- Jax
I could open a cheap hotel/data center with vibrating magic finger beds/harddrives! $$$$
[This sig left intentionally blank.]
I can't wait to line my wall with those things, and call it a RAID!!! WOOT
So, if I can take a guess here, they're moving the data instead of the heads? Like bubble memory from ~25 years ago?
(Ouch, I feel old now. I still have an Intel eval kit lying around)
Does this mean it will make a buzzing noise rather then a whine?
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
I wonder if the piezo actuator would be more reliable than spinning drives? I also wonder what would happen if you outfitted a traditional, spinning drive with ``many, many read:write heads''? That should speed things up just as much as shaking the drive, I would think.
See what I've been reading.
This is surely the most useless article I've seen posted here in some time, and that's saying a lot, considering we're just out of election season. The article doesn't tell you anything significant about how it works, the company's website consists of two press releases that don't tell you jack shit, so how about it folks - someone want to fill in a poor /. poster by telling me how this ------- thing works?
ABSURDITY, n.: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion.
While I appreciate innovation, I think companies should really try to improve the current state of solid state storage devices. Obviously, no moving parts mean fewer points of failure. Also, other than saying that these devices could theoreticly be better than current spinning disks and flash memory, this article is pretty scant on hard specs about the tech. I guess it's way too early for them to release such information, but I'd like to see some specs on it. Like how they are going to cancel out background noise vibrations. Seems to me like this technology would be very exposed to faults due to things like that, perhaps even small vibrations due to loud noise/etc.
stuff
A 'hard drive' could be the same size and shape as an LCD screen
Personally, I prefer my harddrives to be less than 12 inches square... (12x12 = 17" diagonal)
I could see this as possibly useful for a slim computer/tablet sort of thing, but I'd imagine that I could get more oomph out of a slim computer with a 0.25" thick CF card.
So instead of getting bad sectors i'll be getting burnt pixels.... Great
Ok, go ahead and mod me off-topic. I'm suddenly, for the first time getting a message about an active-x control on this page. (yeah, IE, got to have it for business reasons, get off my back) I doubt this is flash, because I never get any notifications about flash... Anyone else getting this? Is it something new?
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins, for they are subtle, and quick to anger.
The costs of these need to be cut down some more. I could care less about differnet types of "movable" disks.
once we get these, almost-instant boot, awesome read times, then we will get rid of another bottle neck
The signal processing done to the analog signal from one read/write head is tremendous. The performance of modern hard drive comes from the signal detection algorithms and advanced error correction that is performed.
You simply cannot do this at low cost when you have got several thousand or million r/w heads.
--- Eat my sig.
Being a light sleeper, I already have to turn off my computer every night - and it has an Antec quiet case and a SATA (that I like to think is quiter than a standard IDE 7200 RPM ChugMaster).
As far a hard drive that shakes... TFA doesn't say anything about noise factor, but I'm imagining the sound of forgetting to take your car keys and some loose change out of your jeans when you put them in the dryer.
"Stop throwing the Constitution in my face, it's just a goddamned piece of paper!" - George W. Bush Nov. 2005
This "new drive" seems to have all the disadvantages of a drum, plus another: it doesn't spin. Instead it just shimmies back and forth.
Well, maybe the new magical material will handle this OK. With the old drums, spinning them up often took several minutes because of the huge inertia (weight was often in the hundreds of pounds for the bigger ones... disaster when the bearings seize and the drum smashes through brick walls!)
Release a rumour, have some 3rd party effect, then fade away.
Just take it from infineon, SCO and now kodak, it works!
Anyone see a patent for this anywhere? Sounds really stupid to me, and I keep thinking of any obscure religion that has April 1st today (because of diff. calendars etc.)
Well I can imagien it will take as long as it has taken platter technology to give us these capacities and speeds right? So maybe in 10-15 years we will use these vibro-storage devices.
I can see a porn tie in somewhere here... just not sure where...
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
Here's a new product... Drive of Broken Glass (TM).
Your kids will love it.
Laws are for people with no friends.
The idea seems to be that a vibrating sheet could move, while a grid of read/write heads could stay in place, just so something moves to generate a changing magnetic field. While that's certainly true, a spinning disc could also have mutiple heads per arm, multiple arms per disc, and so on. Getting a closely packed array of read/write heads is an equal challenge in either case, and having the surface move continually in the same direction is much easier than having it oscillate.
This would affect what shapes a drive could be manufactured in, but that's unlikely to matter enough to make the idea catch on.
Who is John Cabal?
Shake my data like a british nanny.
/. find any less informative article for us. This thing could be a friggin etch-a-sketch on speed for all the detail in the article.
I agree with the grumbles about mixing vibrations and data. Could
Bacardi + slashdot = negative karma.
A 'hard drive' could be the same size and shape as an LCD screen.
I predict that within 100 years, hard drives will have twice the storage capacity, be ten thousand times larger, and be so expensive that only the five richest kings of Europe will own them.
Will my data be all ghosted? Like column 54 on my spreadsheet will show faint trails of what was on column 53?
Who the hell wants a hard drive that big? What's the advantage here, is it more durable, longer lifespan?
It still has mechanical parts to fail, and it sounds like they'd fail faster with all the shaking and tons of read/write heads.
It sounds like something from the Bad Idea Jeans SNL sketch.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Now my computer can do the hamster dance across my desk when all the drives "spin up" (or would that be "shake up" now?)
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
Is it April already?
So lets see: If we combine a ton of read/write heads (the thing that makes flash memory so expensive) with vibration/movement (the thing that makes hard drives so crappy) we get an innovative product that is going to change the world and double the size of our desktop computers. Woohoo!
Pardon me for naysaying, but it seems like this is an academic experiment gone awry. The scientist apparently has a case of tunnel vision and is failing to place his/her work in a business context. (And nobody, but slashdot has the balls to break his/her heart...)
"I threw up my hands in disgust and wondered if it had been such a good idea to have eaten my hands in the first place."
If we're talking solid state disks (in which direction in my opinion this is pointing to), I'd rather see something like this in my household :) As to the size of such a "vibrating" storage solution... well, if I don't see it, I don't mind, but I hope it won't cost too much, it won't need more power, it will have higher lifespan, and at least two of these seems highly unlikely (just pick :)
:)
All in all, just let them boil a bit, let's see what comes out. Yup, one more thing, hopefully one will be able to cary home a >100gb version of such a thing in one's hands
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
I can just imagine the racket this thing would make. As shake velocity increases to reduce seek time, so will the inertia of the object being moved. Your laptop would take on a life of its own, as it bounces across the desk like a thing posessed.
My rights don't need management.
For lovers of irony we might note that this feature is about shaky technology. But don't knock it. Hummingbirds hover, they hang in mid-air, because of their vibrating wings. The apparently impossible can happen. A violin's shaking strings produce music. A vibrating storage medium could shake up the storage industry, which could be music to us all.
So.. did peggy hill write this article?...
I winder if CDROM drives and HDD can benefit from multiple lasers which themselves use a scanner like hexagonal reflector to rapidly scan 5/6 tracks of the cd, and you have about 100 lasers reading, then you can cut down wait time like this?
Isn't this like building a scanner with two scanning heads? (and uses a different type of light source?)
I guess we are all wondering, what is the storage medium, what is the non-volitile medium that we can all trust our data on.... and can it be corrupted using off the shelf doomsday data guns!
I am curious for sure... just need details... you can never be too careful in this post dotBomb, bomb, bomb economy.
This may be high speed but:
limited capacity
$$$$$$$$$$
in which case they might use it for storage in some databases apps. [?] or if it has very special data retention properties could be useful on space missions or certain storage.
If it *is* 10% of the cost of a HDD and hugely faster, then we coudl all have nice little fobs on our car keys that carry all the cars service histories... hmmm not a bad idea!!!
a key fob that stores you cars service history! (or the car itself, or the car keys...)
Well... here is hoping *remembers first 20MB hard disk, codenamed 'air-raid siren' on the amiga *wipes tear*
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
So will this be like an Etch-A-Sketch then?
Rather than spending all that time formatting the disk, you just shake it and all your data disappears.
The idea isn't that crazy but don't hold your breath waiting to see it actually work either. This idea is a lot closer to pure research than it is to technical implementation.
If you can change the vibration of individual molecules, you could end up with very high storage densities. I can think of lots of reasons why this wouldn't work but the promise is immense.
While I appreciate the reference to "The Innovator's Dilemma", I think it is a complete red herring. This isn't going to be a 'disruptive technology' for a long time if ever.
I went and found a hosts file that blocks most every known ad-server. I havent seen an ad in months, activex or otherwise.
This sounds rather like core memory, which was abandoned rather a long while ago, due to storage devices vibrating accros rooms. Obviously, the new devices are a lot smaller, so the vibrations will be equally smaller, but surely still damaging to the hardware.
On a slightly unrelated note, I remember a story I heard of an old stack of 20" platters which used to walk across the room when under heavy load, and unplug themselves!
Ok.. I am seriously willing to risk the possiblility of being flambated once more just for saying:
This was a useless, foggy noninformative article, or am I totally off?
First of all, it speaks of readheads on FLASH memory. The problem is: there's no read:write heads on FLASH memory. It is a totally different technology, a type of RAM, where every storing cell is available at every moment. There is no read:write head, there is direct connections.
Then, trying to speak of the new fancy of vibration, it does nothing better than tellin about the hummingbird that hoovers like a miracle?
I think I understood, more due to my own pondering than the bad images of the article, how the technology is to work. A vibrating layer between a godzillian of read:write heads which allows for a very short latency. The article though, doesn't even mention the problems this affords.
As a material vibrates, and this will be very problematic as it will not move uniformly over the whole surface. Parts of the surface will be closer to the readers, parts more off. How will the hardware take this into account? And probably most important, the article speaks like it can directly apply the "readers" from the FLASH memory, to this new vibrating technology. Whow.. Now we now that there are no "readers" in FLASH, how will they go about that? It is far more costly to create a devise that have to read a field, than doing direct connections like in the FLASH. So visualise making how many readers? My 4 year old flash card has 96MB which affords for a stunning 805'306'368 individual bits that would need a single read:write head..
If the storagemedia is supposed to vibrate with a stunning frequenzy, there would be a limit to the thickness of the material, and thus a limit to the number of bits available for reading by each head. You can shake it horisontally and vertically, but still not get too many readable bits, which signals that there would be a problem, actually a lot of ploblems which isn't even adressed in the article.
Is there a possibility to tag the article like.. useless.. or something?
First of all, with so few specifics in the article, one is left with speculating. Speculating tells me that a hard drive with a lot of heads is MUCH more expensive than a regular hard drive. The heads, and the mechanisms for controlling them are probably the most expensive part of a hard drive. So I would think and sheet like drive with a whole lot of heads and a mechanism for controlling the sheet is going to be ridiculously expensive.
Of course, they might have a solution for this, but the post, the article, and the company's web sites leave so much unsaid, we may never know. My guess is we'll never see this. There are many other storage technologies that sound signifcantly more promising than this. And solid state still has a long way to go as well, and as a nother poster pointed out, no moving parts... Sorry if I don't leave a post-it note on my monitor about this one.
From the article: Clayton Christiansen, a Harvard Business School professor, has coined the idea of the innovator's dilemma. If a successful supplier innovates it is generally to add features to and improve a product, but not to destroy it by developing radically better technology.
I've often found it tempting to assume that if capitalism ceased to exist, so would this problem. I'm not asking "would it", but could it?
For this thought experiment, I assume the scenario to be a moneyless society in which sustainable development is of primary importance.
We also might assume that:
1. New technologies aren't made available until they're put through the most rigorous field testing. Even if a project is shelved, the science is in itself regarded as a valued product which may be employed in future technologies.
2. Our hypothetical society utilizes an established set of hardware standards at any given time. The relative universality of the standard is determined pragmatically.
3. Compatibility with existing systems is always addressed as needed.
4. An infrastructure exists to upgrade hardware as unobtrusively as possible when the need arises, rather than as a result of a psychological desire for the illusion of progress.
This experiment is itself a "prototype", but I'm very interested in your insights. When thinking about techno-utopia and contrasting it with the real-life status quo, consider who's interests are being served in each case. I'm trying to envision a realistic scenario in which technological impact is healthy and sustainable.
In this case, the imaginary society roughly sketched above would almost certainly house an intricate bureaucracy, so our perceived technological evolution might actually be even slower in such a case. However, even if each technology's generation lasted longer, that doesn't inherently mean slower scientific progress, but slower techno-social change. Even in our society, of course, development and progress happen behind the scenes even if we don't see a marketed product. It's not entirely proper to evaluate the technology status quo as a whole based solely on what products we have chosen to engineer.
But consider that all products have a social impact, that they're chosen for their desired impact, and that it's safe to assume that the impetus for their production is usually not socially-conscious in the long-term.
Gawd, moderators, did anybody look at that Wikipedia page referenced in that comment. My retina hurts!
Am I the only one who thought of the Dilbert where he (Dilbert) was running Voice Recognition software and Wally was saying how it would be a shame if the software decided to "CLOSE ALL WINDOWS" and "REBOOT," or something of the like.
Now, Dilbert might not even have to be running Voice Recognition software for Wally to perform...
What's the user cares about are things like price, performance, capacity, form factor, power load, etc.
It's what you get for your dollar/euro/whatever that counts. For most of us, it's the steak, not the sizzle.
Still, it's good to know what the future may hold, and we can hope that this new technology will help drive performance and capacity up while driving size, power, and cost down.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
The last thing anybody wants here is an earthquake rewriting all of their data.
I can't wait to get one of these shaking, and therefore vibrating, babies in my laptop! Just make sure the shaking is perpendicular to the keyboard ;)
Uhm- Ferrite Core memory vibrated along the plane that they were magnetized in. Most of them were installed in vibration isolation enclosures. Of course, computers weighed a freakin' ton then, and did not tend to walk. They worked by hard magnetizing beads or toruses of ferrite (think iron) All that said, I think the focus needs to be on the head structures. Now I was reading the discussion, and wondered about the application of the piezo sheet concept as the head to a drive instead of the drive itself. The other key to consider has less to do with the size and structure of the hardware and more the routing and connectivity of eeny little wires. A large-track head on silicon that can decode and communicate over fewer than a gazillion wires would be better for the industry.
The guy, in this article, says that flash rom "is faster" than discs. If you're comparing a plain flash eeprom chip (nothing fancy) and the latest hard drives, this is clearly false. My current hard drive sustains a 50-60 Mbytes/s fingers in the nose, and a lot of fancier hard drives can get much more throughput than that. That's about 16 ns/byte. I don't know of a lot of flash eeprom chips that have such a low access time. Of course, you could always "stack" up several of them so as to widen the data path (128, 256, even more maybe? bytes in a row). That would solve the read time. Write time is still pretty much a lot longer than on most hard drives, though. Even if you widened the data path a lot. Which would cause other problems. Just a thought. I think the author was a bit quick here. Motionless storage devices may be the future, but I don't see it coming any time soon. There is still a lot to be doing in solid-state memory before we can achieve this.
Do you mean the 1" LCD on the front of my phone or a 55" LCD TV?
Look, mom, I can store 5KB or my etch-a-sketch!
:wq
I guess that dibert comic about the PHB shaking his "laptop" because it was hung will come true, though instead of rebooting the laptop it'll just format the harddrive...
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
with the intense sound driven cooler that was mentioned a couple of months back. Make an oscillating hard drive that cools the processor?
This sounds rather like core memory, which was abandoned rather a long while ago, due to storage devices vibrating accros rooms.
Core memory consisted of an array of small magnetic toroids in which data was stored as the direction of magnetism in each of the toroids. I used to have an IBM 16 kbit Core memory card that was the size of an A4/8.5" x 11" piece of paper. It was abandoned because solid state memory was a lot cheaper, denser and used much less power.
Core memory is completely motionless so I'm wondering how it could "vibrate across rooms". Maybe you could educate me on this?
myke
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
Can't we just get someone to finish dev on those little plastic cards they used on Star Trek? Those things held shitobits of data...holograms too!
Wow, it's the shaver industry all over again. Do you make a flat shaver where a head moves back and forth under a foil? Or is it better to do a rotary shaver?
...the Hard Drives shake You!! ...Zeesh must be a Monday
This didn't work because you broke the rules man!
/. code realised you subconsiously were trying to avoid the article. It went ahead and slashdotted the real servers on your behalf and then placed a fake article in it's place so you wouldn't be disappointed.
I quote from your comment. The article doesn't tell you anything significant about how it works...
And here is your sig. Proudly posting without reading the article since 1998!
Obviously the new and improved
Moral of the story: Sig. and actions must be consistent at all times.
The article is totally content free, and reads like it was written in german, translated to french, and then translated to english. "I wrote a this piece on Techworld about it." Yeah, I can tell you "wrote a" this piece, pal. Next time cut the crap with butterflies and hummingbirds and tell us how the hell a piezo drive actually WORKS.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
In the old days (pre 1970) they made some hard drives on rotating drums with an array of fixed heads, maybe 128 of them. As the areal density increased, it became impractical to construct that many heads, so they switched to moving heads. Ever since then the research has focused on improving the moving head assembly.
I've been wondering about a fixed array of hundreds of heads, conceptually one per track, hardwired and switched electronically rather than moved mechanically. The cost of a head assembly is not the GMR head itself, but mounting the thing in the right place on the floating heads.
Everything would be improved over current designs, from power consumption and reliability to a dramatic speed increase. I think in the long run the price would drop considerably, since the spinning disk itself would be the only moving part.
In terms of the speed, consider the average seek time. With average seek time would be the time it would take for half a revolution of the disk, or 1/20000 of a second (.05 ms), and even less with caching, but that's hard math.
sigs, as if you care.
...in the iPod she keeps in her pocket. It is nice to see her so enthusiastic about new technology.
I have to wonder about her sudden interest though...hmmmm....
Oh come on i've been 'storing data' on these "LCD sized harddrives" things for years. But shaking it side-to-side like they are suggesting just erases the data... at least its a quick format :)
http://www.etch-a-sketch.com/
Hey look no pointless curley braces or semicolons... just like Python
I bought one of those new vibrating storage units and now my girlfriend likes to sit on my cpu tower.
Yes. But the post explains as much as the linked article does...
For a background on the technology, check out:
http://yogi.pdl.cmu.edu/research/MEMS/
quote: "storage capacity of 1-10 GB of data in under 1 cm^2 area with access times of under a millisecond and streaming bandwidths of over 50 Mbytes per second."
The research is about 5 years old. Because of constant seek times (the surface agitates in both x and y axes) and a kajillion heads, this is technology really designed to bridge EEPROM versus hard drive access times/throughput.
Think 50 Mbytes per second isn't any great shakes? Keep in mind that this is a chip less than a square centimeter in area, and start thinking of replacing RAID drives with these.
sloth jr
will it scale?
They claim to have a patent application, but there is no "Dataslide" anywhere in issued US patents or pending applications. The only name on the site, "David Barnes", doesn't bring up anything relevant in patent searches, either.
Piezoelectric actuators for disk heads have been built. They're a fine-tuning device, to tweak the head position by tens of nanometers to keep it on track. They work, but the extra cost and complexity only yielded a 35% positioning improvement for Fujitsu. Seagate has also played around with this technology. It may be shipping in some drives already. But it's only used for fine positioning; the coarse positioning is still a motor drive.
...either "go and read" or simply "read"...
(sorry)
Heat generation is one problem.
you have to speed up and slow down the point several for every half cycle.
This is a lot of energy, even assuming it is all on 'springs' you will get some mechanical loss due to friction.
This will likely be much more heat and power consumption then a current rotating drive.
What about the cost of many heads? Right now a hard drive is a small number of expensive heads, and a large area of cheap media. This could cause the cost to skyrocket.
www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0875845851/ 002-3038742-4128836?v=glance
As you may know, the Innovator's Dilemma is a book which tries to explain how the best companies in an industry fail. These companies are uniformly customer focused and keep up with the latest technology and yet they fail. The author introduces the concept of a 'disruptive technology' which is initially so lame that nobody pays any attention to it. The point is that by definition, Seagate wouldn't pay any attention to it. I'm just reading the book now so I can't totally defend it but it makes a pretty convincing argument.
Having said the above, I agree with you that this technology isn't close to being a disruptive technology yet. To be there, it would have to be at least minimally functional and I didn't see any evidence of that in the article.
Once the valves (seals) can be manufactured precisely enough, and the real-world effeciency begins to approach the theoretical effeciency, we will all use them.
Until then, we will have to live with the old reciprocating hard drives that try to shake themselves apart as they operate.
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
Finding the drum after it has smashed thru the brick walls.
emt 377 emt 4
It seems like this can be related to the difference between rotary and piston engines. Both work, and the vibrations can be quelled in a piston engine. Some configurations - such as an inline 6 cylinder engine - have better inherent balances than other piston-based designs.
Try eMusic. DRM free, legal, MP3 downloads.
the etch-a-sketch, now comes the shakable hard drive. It brings new meaning to the term secure deletion. Rumor is that the CIA is going to purchase 5,000 of these units at $1,450 a piece. Panasonic has even created a "tough" version of the etch-a-sketch specifically for this purpose.
i want to live life, not just go through the motions
My understanding is that the oscilating sheet is very stiff glass-like material with storage lements (like pixels in a way) layered onto it in a photo-lithography process. Above it, and potentially below it, is an array of read:write heads that are fixed whilst the glass sheet vibrates through pizeo-electronics. The read:write heads are made from standard LCD fabrication techniques. The prototype uses less than 4% of the power needs of a rotating hard drive. The glass sheet has a zero co-efficient of expansion. The data addressing is direct addressing in 512 byte page segments, on standard magnetic media. The prototype has a HDD-equivalent speed of 72,000 rpm with potential to reach 12 million rpm. (Should be opm really - oscillations per minute?) It's all early days with 3 years needed, I guess, for product to appear. Neat idea though.
I used to use an old IBM with a card mounted hard drive. If anyone turned off the computer the drive would seize up and fail to spin. I'd have to crack the case, pull the card and give it a few good rotating snaps to eliminate the stiction. This was one case where shaking the drive was a -good- thing.
Which actually brings me to an idea. What if the disc were instead a sphere, and moved within a 3d plane. You could have read heads at 3 axes, and perhaps some non-read strips where something would be used to rotate the sphere (assuming that it wouldn't be held in air by magnetic suspension and rotated in a similar way).
Would you be able to store more data on a sphere than a single-platter disc? How about stability, as one has greater mass but perhaps better balance (no wobble).
I'm not a hard-drive architect, but perhaps somebody else could comment on this?
Used to be a feature of early NCR (National Cash Register, also known as No Computers Really) machines before disks were readily available.
Its keys features were
a/ It drowned out small jet aircraft taking off from the same room.
b/ The cards would fail to feed frequently, making sure that the days did not drag for your system operators when they did not have forms and VFU loops to load on the printers.
c/ The entire cabinet, which was about the size of a vending machine, could hold megabytes of data.
d/ It gave access times measured in seconds, so the fact that your computer was blazingly slow did not matter.
Squirrel!
I don't think these would be very power hungry as long as they are vibrated at the crystals natural frequency. It takes very little to keep an object vibrating at it's natural harmonic. What I see happening is an element that is constantly vibrating (ie, flexing) until it comes apart.
Flexible AND resonant at high frequency takes a LOT of engineering.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
Hey man, check this out, my new 30" wide screen harddrive is in, is that not the coolist thing you've ever seen!?!? Oh, don't mind that fact that it TAKES UP A WHOLE WALL!
--
I would have thought the reason why disk-based memory is cheaper per mb than electronic-based memory is actually because of economics, not technology - if disks had never caught on and instead people used various types of RAM for un-powered storage then that would have more mass-production and would get to the point where it was just as cheap as hard-drives are. Remember only a decade ago a 512 mb hard-drive would have cost you an arm and a leg, but today 512 mb of RAM is far cheaper! Hopefully very soon, moving parts will die out in most PCs and data will be exchanged online or direct by wireless or USB memory or by one of those really old CD-RW things as a last resort... im just glad floppies are dead.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
...what our problem is....
;)
We seem hell bent on making the drives spin faster rather than putting in more heads.
Why not, for instance, put a triangle shaped series of head that has its narrow point towards the center of the disc and the wide end towards the edge. This would give you the same read speed at the center as the outter rim and if you made one big head (or a series of small ones more likely) the head would never move, thats less problems right there, the speed would be faster because instead of one head per platter that has to traverse the disk you would have a driv that literally anything on the platter could be read in one revolution.
We could cut down on the rotational speed, which as a byproduct we have tons of heat and an ever increasing level of sophistication from the bearings, a better lifespan because fewer moving parts and the ones that do move move much slower and probably have a higher level of performance.
Then again I don't make hard drives, maybe its allready been tried and I just need to STFU
"The saddest words of mice and men, are not those which were, but should have been."
Disclaimer: I work for a company, but I don't speak for them.
Betamax was the inferior technology. Sure it had higher image quality, but it didn't have sufficient playtime to hold feature length films, and it was significantly more expensive. By the time the playtime problem was resolved, VHS was already dominant, and the price difference was even more substantial.
Remember, the superior technology always wins. If a technology that appears to be superior loses, then you just need to think harder about what was wrong with it, or what was right with the competition.
a http://www.realdoll.com/
Ungh Ungh Save Save Save Save!!!!
YESSSSS!!!!!
My hyperlinks aren't worth the paper they're printed on.
I tried shaking my hard drives, but they worked even worse afterwards!
The current program is at the stage where commercialization is possible by 2006. The storage segment first addressed is portable storage of between 2 and 10 gigabytes. (SD card form factor).
Actually ran across some of this a few years ago.
In a plant in Oklahoma City, some of the old processors used magnetic core memory.
One 16k memory module was about the size of a locker (24" x 24" x 6'). The thing was being decomissioned, so I took the covers off to see the memory.
Lots of tiny wires (I think 6 pass through each bead) with beads on them in grids. And stacks of grids.
Beads were about 1-1.5mm across (been a while).
And I touched them.
I don't know why, but it's just kind of cool that I could actually see the bits. And I touched a bit.
My kids will probably never touch a bit.
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
The website has not been updated for some time at the insistence of patent agents because of an ongoing review of secondary IP. The patents have been filed in the US by an idividual on the advice of tax attorneys and will be assigned to a uk 'ltd' or 'plc' when we are advised it is most appropriate. The ROW has been rotected by PCT. Piezoelectric actuators can provide high resonance at high load in some geometries, the current prototypes are being moved at the equivalent to 72,000 rpm for a 3 1/2" SCSI footprint.
It's application 20040130815, "Information storage systems", by James Barnes. The basic idea is to go back to head-in-contact recording, like a floppy, rather than the flying heads used in hard drives. Diamond coating is supposed to keep the substrate from wearing out. A huge number of read/write heads is envisioned. ("Indeed a preferred embodiment of the invention has over 64 million heads in a rectangular array of 1024 long by approximately 64 thousand wide.") These are being vibrated back and forth through small distances by piezoelectric actuators, eliminating the usual voice-coil positioner.
Fabricating that will be a neat trick.