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

Bond Drive...

[Anonymous Coward]

Cue jokes about "shaken, not stirred..."

20"

[3770]

Man, a 20" hard drive.

That's not progress.

Re:20"

[Anonymous Coward]

is there any benifit to this? i mean, it sounds like if we had this to start out with, our current hard drives would be an improvement. just because something is different doesn't mean it's better.

Size of an LCD?

[NemosomeN]

Which one? The one on my watch, the one on my cell phone, the one on my calculator, or the one on my laptop?

Grammar

[meabolex]

I wrote a this piece on Techworld about it.

That really makes me want to go read the article.

Re:Grammar

[base_chakra]

"I wrote a this piece on Techworld about it."

That really makes me want to go read the article.

Yes, I found that introduction to be highly offensive to English-speaking Italians.

I'm shaking mine right now

[Anonymous Coward]

It seems to be wor

Piezoelectric

[JaxWeb]

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.

Re:Piezoelectric

[ajlitt]

Right. Except the bit about the car lighters. Car lighters have a spiral of bimetal (a clad strip of two metals with dissimilar thermal expansion characteristics, see inside an old mechanical thermostat) that heats up as a circuit is completed between the center pin (12V) and the housing of the lighter socket. When the bimetal reaches a certain temperature, the bimetal spring twists and releases the pushbutton mechanism of the lighter, breaking contact with the 12V pin.

Piezoelectrics are used in grill ignitors and 'electronic' lighters. They all use the same principle: Basically a piezoelectric material is put at the business end of a small hammer mechanism (much like a center punch) that strikes after a certain amount of pressure is applied at the button. Since the voltage at the edges of a piezoelectric material is proportional to the change in pressure, the quick blow produces a high voltage spike. That spike is fairly low current, but above the breakdown voltage of the air between the two contacts in the igniter.

Interestingly, these lighter modules are great fun for zapping people. Since it's a low current, there's really no danger to using these. It's much like a static shock.

One nifty application is in electronic buzzers. While that in itself may not be very inspirational, the actual design is pretty slick. Many fixed-frequency buzzers use a piezo elememt that has a small 'island' in the conductor along one pole. That island of conductive material is connected to a third wire. This wire is used as feedback to the oscillator driving the buzzer. What happens here is that you have the speaker (the majority of the element) and a separate microphone in the same substrate, enabling you to get a consistent tone by forcing feedback through the element itself! Since the peak volume of the buzzer is achieved at the resonating frequency of the element, this scheme locks the buzzer to the loudest tone it is designed to emit without any tuning of any sort.



Also, check out some info on the 'net on the use of piezoelectrics in: SAW filters (surface acoustic wave), fuel injectors, crystal oscillators (not just for your Timex!), angular rate gyros, and micromanipulators such as scanning tunneling microscope heads.

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?

Re:WTF?

[Wyatt Earp]

I think this works by someone with a nothing story putting a link to it here and so people click through and huzzah! Hits come a rolling.

And wow, that is a poorly written article too.

"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. "

It was like, shaky...humm, Word Thesaurus, give me shaky words to use and I will use them all in my closing.

Meh...

[krymsin01]

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.

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

An engineer

[flowerp]

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.

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)?

Seems like a old storage drum that doesn't spin

[shoppa]

Before we had disks (I'm talking about the 1960's), the ultimate in storage was the drum. It was a few feet long, spinning at hundreds to low thousands of RPM, and usually with fixed heads (a few dozen to a few hundred, typically).

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!)

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).

It's interesting, but won't improve anything.

[Artifakt]

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.

You think hard drives are noisy now?

[earthforce_1]

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.

Re:Because current machines aren't loud enough

[merlin_jim]

it has an Antec quiet case and a SATA (that I like to think is quiter than a standard IDE 7200 RPM ChugMaster).

Hmmm let's think about this for a second...

SATA is Serial ATA, a bus format.

Other formats are IDE, E-IDE, etc.

Do SATA drives spin? Sure they do...

Do they spin as fast as non-SATA drives? Sure they do...

What's different on them? The bus...

Does the bus make any noise? No...

So why exactly do you think that SATA matters one way or the other on noise?

Oh and these drives, if they ever become more than a pipe dream, would almost certainly vibrate at ultrasonic frequencies.

Huh???

[Pedrito]

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.

Dilbert Voice Recognition panel...

[Glove d'OJ]

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...

There goes Energy Star

[gearmonger]

Rotating something a fixed speed is pretty efficient. Shaking something, where you're constantly changing its velocity, isn't so much. What'll this do to power consumption?

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!

Re:Fewer moving parts?

[Doctor Memory]

Not necessarily. If you've got "many, many" heads, then you have several options. One would be to have some fixed heads above several tracks, eliminating seek time (great for swap space). Another would be to partition the disk into platter groups, with a separate R/W head serving each group. The separate actuator arms could use the same pivot point and magnet assembly. I don't think you'd need a special controller to prevent head crashes, the head assembly only sweeps ~1/4 of the disk surface anyway, adding another arm at the opposite corner wouldn't interfere. It could probably be done within an existing 5.25" form factor, too.

Re:Hmm

[dgatwood]

That's a rather problematic comparison. I've only had one or two very cheap power supplies (wall warts) fail because of a coil going open. Not a single short ever.

More often than not, power supplies fail because of the fact that they are the first line of defense against the electrical supply with all its surges and spikes. Those spikes cause damage to capacitors and voltage regulators that builds up over time until the part fails. The result is that the power supply ends up delivering the wrong voltage (usually higher than desired on one rail, lower or zero on another) and often pulsating DC.

I've only had two computer PSUs fail. One of them went open on the output, but both coils of the transformer seemed to check good. (I didn't pull it out of circuit, so I can't be certain, but the resistance seemed reasonable.) The other one shut itself off repeatedly. After analysis, it was hitting a thermal cut-off because the fan had stopped spinning.

I've had many laptop power supplies fail, but that's always a cable break or short. I have had three such supplies replaced and a fourth that just started sparking....

Never a single case of a coil shorting. A coil shorting would just result in a voltage drop if it happened on the secondary or a voltage boost if it happened on the primary. It would take a very serious short before you noticed it, unlike motors where a short often means that the motor won't have enough strength to start.

More than that, the part of a hard drive that fails is almost never the motor. It's usually something stupid like a bearing leaking oil all over the platter or a head sticking somewhere and then either gouging the platter or snapping off and then gouging the platter.

The real question is whether micromotive hard drives would be more reliable than spinning ones. Depends. How are those devices lubricated (or are they lubricated)? What prevents a head crash? I assume that the heads aren't supported by a cushion of air, which would be an improvement, but beyond that, they still have the same potential mechanical issues, only now there's more than one or two heads to deal with. The more heads, the more interconnects, and thus the more potential points of failure.

This sounds an awful lot like probe-based storage. If it is, the advantages are in terms of increased density, not increased reliability. We won't know about reliability until those things are widely deployed. Until then, it's just conjecture.

Just my $0.02.