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."

Comments

WTF?

[general_re]

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?

Solid State Drives

[hsmith]

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

Re:An engineer

[CTho9305]

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)?

Re:Seems like a old storage drum that doesn't spin

[wom]

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).