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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.
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?"
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.
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
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!!!!
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!
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.
"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!"
This happened where I used to work in the mid 1980s - a 256MB 12" stack on our VAX 11/750 was being confidence tested by a DEC engineer, but he'd forgotten to wind the feet of the unit down onto the floor - the unit started to shoot forward from between the other rows of system units, like a 100m sprinter making a false start, and the two of us dived across the room and grabbed a side each as the unit reached the end of its power and data cables!
AT&ROFLMAO
That depends on how the technology might be applied. If in that 20" you had a storage density of...say...1Gb per square inch(hard drives have areal densities of greater than 50Gb per square inch)...and if my math is correct, approximately 400 square inches per side, that would be about 800Gb(100GB) of storage in a medium that may very well be incorporated into your screen's chassis. Depending on the level of vibration and the thickness of the enclosure, this would be an interesting technology for the next generation of tablet pc's.
Most of us are still using magnetic hard drives, so a laser (and especially multiple lasers) might have some unintended effects.
I was wondering about that. You also have to consider the size of a transistor in a flash device, versus a hard-drive-like head. Isn't the transitor going to be significantly smaller (and orders of magnitude cheaper)?
My server
That drum had a head per track, and the biggest problem was starting and stopping, as the heads tended to mar the drum surface eventually destroying it. We had one that spun in helium to dissapate the heat, and keep the air friction down. We also had a head per track disk (2 surfaces). As the disk heated up it expanded, so the heads were mounted on some wierd mechanism to allow them to track the data. Man the 70's were fun. Average access time was about 6 ms. Booting was instant anyway though, we had magnetic memory (core).
Trouble, a mistake or fun, your choice
More of FYI...
When you put a current through a piezoelectric material (e.g. Quartz), it vibrates.
As far as I remember a detail is: when you apply _variable_ current, piezoelectric material will vibrate.
I worked during a training period with accelerometers. Basically those are a bit of piezoelectric material connected to an oscilloscope (to make it simple). The sensitivity of those devices is quite simply mind blowing. Put 10 m between you and your experiment table, just move you arm and observe the plot on the oscilloscope !
Applications of piezo accelerometers can be vibration-signature analysis. Any engine (motor, heater...) vibrate. So you can benchmark "normal" vibrating and pre-failure signature... Provides ways of forecasting failures on planes, factories...
I developed a bench with LabView at CEN-SCK in Belgium. Was interesting.