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Hitachi Predicts 3D Hard Disks by Year's End
daria42 writes "Hitachi has announced that its perpendicular, or 3D, hard disks should be out by the end of 2005." From the article: "Today, hard drives record and store data in a longitudinal fashion, with the read/write heads scanning over a horizontal plane. In perpendicular recording, data bits are aligned vertically, allowing for more data to be squeezed into a finite area. Put another way, data will go from being stored on a two-dimensional XY grid to living in a three-dimensional XYZ space."
So how exactly does the head seek in 3d?
Cemil.
Hey, I'm all for whatever works to get me these bigger (and eventually cheaper) storage drives. It's all a guy can do to keep track of drawers full of archived 200gb hard drives to organize his 2.5 terrabytes of porn. Hopefully we're only a few years away from being able to cram all of that, and more, into a single affordable consumer drive.
It'll be interesting to see if this technology can be made to work with existing IDE and SATA interfaces.
For 15 years I've been reading stories of new non-volatile storage. I rememer reading about holographic memory in 1989.
Get back to me when it's actually a marketable, mass-producable product.
$7.95/mo, 200 GB disk, 2TBxfer, MySQL, PHP, RoR.
When do I get my 4D Hard Disk?
I'm tempted to say: "Nothing new move along"; but I appreciate that it's quite different when applied to digital media.
Although storing information in 3D is nothing new, that's how you get music in stereo from a vinyl record.
Does this mean if I lie my computer on it's side, I'll get more HDD space?
"Who says nothing is impossible? Some people do it every day!" - Alfred E. Neuman
You said it.
What kind of performance one could expect from a drive like this? Would it be any different from a regular hard drive, just with a heck of a lot more space, or would there be some tangible difference? I suspect there wouldn't be, but nonetheless while this seems rather promising I don't want to find that it packs some pretty heavy penalties for the storage.
but havn't disks always had three "dimensions"? The track (x), cylinder (y) and head (z).
Maybe I just don't understand the article. If the drive is still physically a bunch of cylinderical platters spinning and an armature that moves across the surface of the platters, all this means is the drive firmware has been re-written to use a different logical disc format. Big whoop.
Current affordable hard drives are, well, pretty farking big already. I care a lot less about capacity now than reliability. I despise hard drives and look forward to the day when they are just a bad memory. (And I haven't even been burned badly, since I back up.)
Give me a guaranteed 5-year lifespan on a drive, then you'll have my patronage... more gigs don't get my attention anymore.
..they'll be shipped with Duke Nukem Forever
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
AAaaaaaaaaaahhhaaaaaa!!!
Mod up as being Damned Informative!!!
"Who says nothing is impossible? Some people do it every day!" - Alfred E. Neuman
I'm just amused this was modded as insightful.
:P
True enough I s'pose
"This is your life, and it's ending one minute at a time."
Hitachi will actually come out with drives that employ perpendicular-recording techniques toward the end of this year...
So, it looks like it is finally happening for real...
...this is Unix!
how do I visualise this? Data in jelly blubber with a read/write needle swimming through it? Data gets read out where two laserbeams cross?
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
This site explains the difference between perpendicular and Parallel recording technologies. By the way, all hard disks are 3D. The slashdot headline is once again misleading.
I for one would like to say I think that writeup is terribly written.
I say this because the writeup describes what 3D means bout four times, even though it's perfectly obvious from the first time it's said.
When it comes to the important bit - how it will actually work - there is no mention of it at all.
Are the heads going to detect things at multiple distances? Are these just going to be like multi-layer platters? Or is it going to be one solid block? How would that be read?
The article would have been much better if it had cut out all but one of the descriptions of what 3D is, instead giving us some details on how this will actually work.
Just my $0.02,
Michael
"Goodness me, how unlike the FBI to abuse the trust of the American public." -- The Onion
Am I the only guy on the planet who doesn't seem to need more than about 80GB?
My MP3 collection fits happily on my 20GB player. Every project I work on fits easily in my 20GB home partition. /usr is at well under 50% usage, and /var can probably handle the web logs for an average Slashdotting.
Frankly, short of gratuitously downloading porn and leaving dirty copies of the Mozilla source tree lying about, how does one fill up the kind of space that one of these drives would make available (without running a server of some sort, of course)?
unixkb.com -- articles on practical Unix issues.
So, does this mean that you have an "orb" that the head moves around on? I really don't see how we can do this without introducing MORE moving parts to break.
They should really put their energy into something more solid (ie less movement). Reliability is most important. I don't care if I have 30TB of space if I have to replace drives every week.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
This article should help you.
If we are to assume the standard spinning disk model is still used what is the third dimension?
I find it hard to believe that drive heads will be able to move through the solid substrate of the disk which rules out a spatial dimension. Time based seems a little extreme.
Do they mean magnetic field strength? This could be interesting but how do you know your value is the result of a write and not the loss of magnetic field over time?
"To get early experience with its 230 gigabit per square inch drives, Hitachi is conducting field tests with a few hundred employees, customers and outside engineers.
'We've got a babysitting program running in the back to see how the hard drives are doing,' Healy said. 'We are building up our understanding of our quality and reliability.'"
Now, maybe Hitachi is, for some odd reason, testing prototypes of a non-3D drive in this article, or maybe, just maybe, they have prototype drives in existence.
Seriously, this took 2 fucking minutes to read. Are you fingers that much easier to use than your eyes?
pressesc (873084) Answered this in his post above. There arn't multiple bits encoded in the same domain, its just that the domains are arranged permendicular to the disk. Its like this, lay three pencils down on the table, end to end. Thats three bits. Which way the points point determines wether each pencil is a 1 or 0... Now, stand all the pencils on end, perpendicular to the table, but still next to each other. The way the pencil points still determins the bit value but you can fit a hell of a lot more pencils on you table if you stand them all on end. I hope this helps someone. opoliges fro teh speeling. Pete
Perendicular recording has nothing to do with storing data in the Z-axis, it is merely a method to compress data on the disk (or better, the orientation of the magnetic field on the platter). So, no depth recording in layers, just higher data density.
It sounds like that Laser Cube thing HP or Compaq were working on. It was a glass cube and you wuld use lasers to 'burn' the glass on the inside and frost it, to represent a bit.
-- There are 10 types of people in the world: Those who understand binary, And those who don't.
How densely is the data stacked on the Z-Axis, and how much of an improvement in density is this over the usual systems? And what is the underlying technology that allows such stacking?
These are important technical questions that are glossed over in the article. They mention 23 gigabytes per square inch by 2007, but little more. In fact it reads like a press release/product announcement. This barely qualifies as news for nerds.
The end result seems to be that it isn't 3D at all then, just a closer packing of bits.
Unlike a dual-layer DVD, which is 3D
Indeed not 3D in any fashion, disappointing isn't it?
I'm confused as to why they haven't shipped these disks already. Surely the technology was first announced years and years ago? Has GMR etc. head sensitivity really been that hard to improve?
Just make a RAID array of 3D hard disks.
While I recognize that Joe User is stashing more and more crap on his hard drive, it seems to me that disk capacity is increasing fast enough to keep pace pretty well, and prices are staying low. Hell, I just bought a pair of 200-gig drives the other day not because I needed them -- I still had over 100 gigs free -- but because they were cheap.
Rather than increased capacity, I'd like to see improvements in the speed of storage, since it's still the biggest bottleneck in overall systems performance.
Try defragging that whole 1 Terabyte or even large partitions of it.
What sacrifices do you make to which dieties to ensure the power doesn't go out while it's in progress?
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
...they're more reliable than some of Hitachi's current drives *cough*deskstar*cough*
http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/storage/display/20031 014160044.html
http://www.seagate.com/cda/newsinfo/newsroom/relea ses/article/0%2C1121%2C1555%2C00.html
We already have 3 dimensions in a disk, rotation and position on a platter being 2 and the multiple platters being the third.
From what I can make out, these drive will be the same as normal disks, but the data will be aligned like so:
N
| as opposed to N=S
S
All this means is that a single bit of data will take up approximately a third of the platter real estate and so you can probably squeeze about three times as much data on it.
Anyway looks like the 80's are back, people are using 3D as a cool word again.
I wonder when we will start to use "Digital" to make out things are great again? Oh yeah thats right RIAA et all are already doing it with their DIGITAL (DRM) music is teh Rox
it went something like this:
3...2...1...
Contact!
silly humans... 3D data storage is for aliens.
No sig for you! Come back one year!
But the REAL question is: Will this be enough space to store Longhorn?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
...I have a second machine. I even got one 400km away I could back-up to. What I do miss is a simple automatic folder synchronization tool for Windoze (still my primary desktop). Better yet, with a virtual "WORM" capability. I.e. I'd donate 10 gigs there, and it'd keep like the 10 last copies of 1 gig here. No "remember to back-up" shit. Just do it live, password protected/encrypted.
With that, harddisks are completely reliable *enough*. Maybe burn a DVD of pics every once in a while, the digicam ones are pretty big. But that's it.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Ok this may be interesting but what about reliabity?
Most people has more disk space than needed, still people feels the need to backup their data on safer storage medium, because HDs are still unreliable. Not to mention they are slow.
I wish HDs manufactures focused more on improving reliability, and speed instead of making disks bigger and bigger - no ones really cares anymore.
okay, you put your data on it, I'll wait right here until you get back to me. I seem to recall Hitachi having quite a few quality issues before and after they bought IBMs drive unit.
Now I won't know which side to hit the darn thing to get it up and running in the morning!
I've always wondered - when a person is undergoing an operation that lasts 4, 6, 8, 12 or more hours, how does the surgeon handle bathroom and lunch breaks? Does the patient just sit there, opened up, while the doc heads down to the local Wendy's? Or is there a backup doctor who takes over during that time? And do surgeons get the same 15 minute break every 4 hours and lunch no later than 5.5 hours that labor laws in most states require ever other employer to provide?
it's amazing that the flash makers have not been pushing harder go gain desktop market share... they've been promising fo years that prices will soon be at the level where they're a feasable alternative to regular hard disks...
at least those regular hard disk makers are continuing to innovate... although hitachi probably has maxtor and seagate on the run with this...
Get your torrents...
Toshiba announced "perpendicular recording" technology in 2004 with a scheduled release Q2, not late this year or next year. With a much better description of how "3d" perpendicular recording works.
Forget 3D, folks. The most remarkable bit of news here is how the bits will go from being "stored" to "living". Holy cow!
The "cue the foo posts in 3, 2, 1..." posts will commence with no subsequent foo posts in 3, 2, 1...
Wish I'd patented it... Multi platter drives have been around almost as long as hard drives. I've always wondered (since the early 80's) how much faster a drive would be, if the data was written in "parallel" instead of "serial" (i.e. striped across 8 platters) I'm wondering, how on earth this "new" idea leads to claims that the data storage will be any denser.. a bit will still take up the same amount of physical space whether a byte's stored vertically ("3d") of horizontally so a platter would in theory not yield any more density than now?? Having said all that, I'm the proud owner of 20 IBM Deathstar drives^M^M^M^M^M^Mdoorstops, which are without a doubt the least reliable drives I've ever encountered. The very thought of putting any data on anything hitachi-IBM gives me the heebiejeebies...
as in cylinder, sector & head?
The short answer is that it'll work, but the reason is that in the meantime we've taken an agnostic approach to accessing drive contents.
A long time ago, in a galaxy far away, we had MFM and RLL drives which (A) required the controller to have a pretty intimate knowledge of a drive's internal workings, and (B) an access scheme that again was tightly coupled to the drive's geometry. It was in fact an addressing where you had to explicitly state the track, sector and head. So if you moved to some other scheme (e.g., adding a 4'th parameter: depth) it would fall flat on its face.
In the meantime, though, technology got smarter. Both problems got solved as follows:
A) IDE (Integrated Drive Electronics).
The industry basically moved away from having dumb drives and a controller that needs to know the exact internal workings of the drive. It took a lot of hint from SCSI. Nowadays the real controller is on the HDD itself, and the "IDE controller" on the mobo is merely a bridge to the specialized bus to commnicate with the real controller.
That's why nowadays you can have CD-ROMS, DVD-burners, etc, on an ATA ribbon. Or why you can have cache on the drives nowadays. Or why you don't have to buy a new motherboard each time a HDD vendor comes up with a new encoding.
So the short story is that as long as the drive comes with an ATA or SATA compatible controller in it, it will work.
B) LBA (Logical Block Addressing)
The addressing scheme also got more agnostic. We no longer tell the drive the exact track-sector-head coordinates. We just tell it "give me the 1075'th sector" and let the drive figure out for itself where that sector is. (That's another point where IDE comes in handy.)
So the short story is: as long as the sectors can be numbered, any geometry will work. Adding an extra dimension just means you'll have to number the sectors differently. But as long as you can number them, you're all set.
(Of course, this is assuming your drive doesn't end up bigger than 144 PETAbytes, which is the limit for 48 bit LBA with 512 byte sectors. If it's more than that, well, we'll have to switch to using more bits.)
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
What will happen when the *AA and friends really crack down on P2P and most of marketplace demand for >40 GB storage suddenly dies down?
Few people do digital film processing at their homes. Many, many people use all the space for mp3s and movies instead. You don't need that many gigs for the one excel and three word docs the average user whips up daily.
we discovered a new way to think.
IDE and SATA != spin disk magnetic storage. :) or even stranger like flash drives or solid state drives (with zoooooming performances).
Different technologies already exist, like CD-ROM
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
So
distance - - - - - - - - >
N S . S N . S N . N S
is now shorter
- - - - - - >
N S S N
S N N S
(Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted!
Reason: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.)
or maybe just misinformed...
does anyone know: is an nvidia or ati card better for using one of these hard drives?
Obviously, this has the potential for increasing storage capacity.
I suspect it could also improve read/write speed. If the bits are stacked vertically, it seems that the read/write head should parse the stacked bits in parallel instead of the current serial fashion.
Let's see if I can dodge the lameness filter...
bit 0 ----\
bit 1 ----\\
bit 2 ----\\\
bit 3 ----\\\\
---------read/write connection (electrical connection back to controller)
bit 4 ----////
bit 5 ----///
bit 6 ----//
bit 7 ----/
To provide additional anti-lameness filter text, I shall mention that the article was rather short on technical detail and Hitachi may in fact already be doing this.
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
For 15 years I've been reading stories of new non-volatile storage. I rememer reading about holographic memory in 1989.
Get back to me when it's actually a marketable, mass-producable product.
Also remember that what was marketable in 1989 isn't marketable in 2005. To force a technology shift, you have to provide a superior technology, which is quite hard when the other is rushing ahead. Many other good technologies have fallen on that sword.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
This is only feasible with a cube shaped case.
... for the forth time, for all the smart people reading /., it's 3D instead of 2D. Like a square and a cube to put it another way. Or another way is a geometric pyramid and an equalateral trianble. Or perhaps another descriptive avenue is a circle and a sphere.
It sounds like a cross between a hard disk and a Rubik's Cube:)
Organization: alphabetical, sometimes numerical or messy
I'm planning on creating one partition on a RAID 5 or 6 system. All the files will be stored as uncompressed WAVs. On top of the RAID partition I'll write/use a virtual device driver that allows compression & decompression on the fly with FLAC or similar open algorithm.
If the increase in access speed continues to lag the increase in capacity, then increased storage capacity isn't much good. After all, what good is it if I can store 50 TB of data if it takes two days to read it?
Ha, ha! Nobody ever says Italy.
You always hear about forensic people being able to get at data that's been written over many times on a hard drive. I wonder if there's any way that could be built into a hard drive. Could you store multiple sets of data in the same place on the hard drive and reread it at different sensitivities, or however they recover overwritten data?
Let me know, hard drive experts.
Oh I see, they just turn the hard disk on its side.
- --- - --- -
Newer"3D" drives store it like this || | ||| |
Man, talk about a misleading article.
..........FULL STOP.
huge lists of music to listen till the end of your natural life :))
http://inphase-tech.com/products/tapestrydrive/ind ex.html
I think that this is a lot more interesting, as although we have huge hard disk capacity as we are, we dont have large removable disk capacity (unless you get a removable HD caddy)
43rd Law of Computing:
Anything that can go wr
fortune: Segmentation violation -- Core Dumped
How is it different from rotating you HD by 90 degrees?!?
That's it... i'll try this at home, put my computer on a horizontal position, so my HDs will be on a vertical position. Then I'll se how much they grow in size.
---- You know how some doctors have the Messiah complex - they need to save the world? You've got the "Rubik's" complex
I have a 3D hard drive. It's dimensions are
DarkMantle I been bored, so I started a blog.
Lisa: Well, where's my Dad?
Frink: Well, it should be obvious to even the most dim-witted individual who holds an advanced degree in hyperbolic topology, n'gee, that Homer Simpson has stumbled into...[the lights go off] the third dimension.
Lisa: [turning the lights back on] Sorry.
Frink: [drawing on a blackboard] Here is an ordinary square --
Wiggum: Whoa, whoa -- slow down, egghead!
Frink: -- but suppose we exte-end the square beyond the two dimensions of our universe (along the hypothetical Z axis, there).
Everyone: [gasps]
Frink: This forms a three-dimensional object known as a "cube", or a "Frinkahedron" in honor of its discoverer, n'hey, n'hey.
Homer: [disembodied] Help me! Are you helping me, or are you going on and on?
Frink: Oh, right. And, of course, within, we find the doomed individual.
After they acquired "Deathstar Technology" from the Empire..err I mean IBM, I've stayed way the hell away from Hitachi.
Just what we needed! A drive that can also crash in the 3rd dimension..
I can't believe they didn't even rebrand/rename the notorious deskstar series after acquiring it from IBM.
After having multiple horrendous experiences with the series while it was produced by IBM, the very mention of the name Deskstar sends chills down my spine *shudders violently*
Perhaps instead one ought look toward using linux with a modern filesystem that works to prevent fragmentation in the first place, like ReiserFS.
Akarsz Magyar Gentoo fórumot? Akkor
I've known about a similar technology since 1999 (although I'm not sure it's exactly the same one that Hitachi is using). It's nice that its finally being commercialized. The technical term is "Quantized Magnetic Disk" and you can find a paper here
http://www.princeton.edu/~chouweb/paper7.pdf.
Any of these can benefit too. Typically, drives use a lot of electricity. If one of these can go in an iPod, it can go in something else for storage. A RAID (pick your favorite type) of these could provide reasonably fast (fast enough anyway) storage for a SAN, NAS, file server, web server, etc. Since they are small, think of something like hot swap bays with these drives in a carrier like you get for a 3 1/2 drive. Except maybe 3 inches deep, each holding like 12 drives. Or as a standard 3 1/2" drive, a 1U chassic that normally takes 5 drives now can hold 6 TB...at todays ratio. At tomorrows, it probably would be substantially higher.
Electrical consumption in a data center is a big deal or for servers in a company is a big deal. Why else are many clusters looking to lower power consumption CPUs or blades? In a colo, sizing performance and power consumption properly results in less space needed for servers, smaller UPSes without loss of functionality, etc. Less space used means lower monthly charges in a colo and lower electric bills in a private data center.
Small physical size storage isn't just for unplugged devices anymore (if ever).
. . . currently the bottleneck for sustained data transfer rate IS data density on the platter. Denser data begets higher sustained data transfer rate.
Exam 4/C again. Maybe I'll do better this time.
I remember that the Next Big Thing in hard drives was going to be perpendicular recording, back in 1982 when it was seen as the only way to get over 10,000 bits per inch. That was over 20 years ago, and *now* it's the wave of the future? What happened?
The determined Real Programmer can write Fortran programs in any language.
This article has Hitachi forcasting the density at 230GB/square inch which allows for a 1TB drive or 20GB 1 inch drive. They're field testing drives with 80GB/square inch and plan on producing drives with 120GB/square inch soon.
2.88 meg 3.5" floppies use perpendicular recording.
I first saw a display on their perpendicular recording techniques in Shibuya Park, Tokyo. It was an exhibition celebrating Hitachi's 40th Anniversary. Covered everything from household appliances though nuclear plants to robots. IIRC they had an incredible 3.5MB on 3 1/2 inch and 8MB on 5 1/4 inch floppy disks.
Slashdot: Where nerds gather to pool their ignorance
If you can stretch to a 10k drive i found they actually spin up past the range of human hearing, which is a nice side effect as they are also very fast.
The access noise is a bit worse I have to admit, but no spin noise.
What's wrong with just getting used to bigger media? We've been spoiled, I think, by the shrinkage of storage media, which has come about because advances in density have been much more rapid than our needs. As we start to run into the theoretical limit on the density of the data, we can still increase capacity by increasing the surface area of the disk. Granted, you can only do this up to a point if you still want it to fit in the same case, but let's think outside the box here (no pun intended). It's not like we've never had to deal with physically large media before.
It's nothing nearly as fantastic as what they claim. It's not even like a dual-layer dvd. There are no layers or thickness to the information, it's still stored on the plane of the hard drive.
When they say 3D, the mean the angular direction of the magnetic field. In current drives, the only thing that is measured is the presence or absence of magnetism. With their drives, the direction of the magnetic field also matters.
The limiting factor would be how accurately they can record and read the direction of the magnetic fields.
if you dissamble a '3d' drive, it will look the same as the current '2d' drive. you still have platters which have magnetic storage layer. the platter still spins and the heads (read and write) fly over it.
in '2d' drives, which is really called longitudinal recording, the magnetic material have their poles in the plane of the platter. in '3d' drives, aka perpendicular recording, the poles are pointing out of the plane.
contrary to what i've read here, having the poles still out of the plane doesn't save space- each bit is a large collection of poles.
the problem w/ longitudinal recording is as you place the bits closer together, the interaction between the bits tend to want them to spontaneously align with each other. you know this. go to your frig, grab some magnets. if you align them properly, you'll see that you can't push them together. or if you align them properly, they stick together. the way the drive makers have over come this problem is to make the magnetic storage layer become very 'hard' magnetically. that is, as you pack the bits together, the crystal structure won't allow neighboring bits which have opposite polarity to spontaneously switch.
there's a problem w/ pushing that two far. if you make it too hard (so you won't have spontaenous decay- i.e. data loss) you'll have problems generating a powerful enough magnetic field to actually write the information. ok, it's easy to generate a powerful magnetic field, but it's hard to confine it to a very small region.
so, perpendicular comes along. now perpendicular has the opposite characteristic. it likes having bits of opposite polarity next to each other. it does NOT like having bits of same polarity next to each other. also in perpendicular recording, the recording media usually has a soft magnetic material below the storage layer which helps to promote the write field strength and focus it (details are involved and are left as an excersize).
i spent (wasted?) three years of my life on modeling perpendicular recording. it turns out that this soft magnetic layer creates more problems than any one expected. in fact, if you could get the hard drive to write most of the poles to be in one direction, you'll find the hard drive will fail. essentially the read head will have have to cope w/ large dc shift due to all these fields coming from this magnetized layer. it also turns out that at high densities, the soft magnetic material doesn't actually help you to do writing since it forces the write field to be perpendicular to the platter and so while you have a strong field, there is very little torque acting on the magnetic spins to actually flip them.
from calculations i did, and from literature, it doesn't appear that perpendicular will buy you a whole lot. perhaps it can get you to 500 Gb/in^2 (about 4x greater than today's drive) if you can find a reader that can handle the dc shift (or you avoid the dc shift by encoding the data intelligently so you don't get large regions of same polarity).
as for laser assisted magnetic recording- not only do you have the same problem as perpendicular (most of these schemes are only for perpendicular recording), but now you have a laser so you have to handle the thermal time scales- you have to heat it fast enough to write, but also cool it down fast enough so you can keep the information. all the problems of perpendicular plus a nice thermal conduction/convection problem. ha!
IBM's millepede is fun- but data rates still appear to be too low.
what's important here is that if the industry does shift to perpendicular, there will be fewer players. it's not clear if Maxtor or Western Digital have enough money to spend on upgrading their fabs. you might be left w/ only Seagate and the Japan as makers of disc drives...
I still can only access the first 528Mb.....
I despise hard drives and look forward to the day when they are just a bad memory.
;-)
Aren't they already a bad memory?
reset the switches to stop the magnetic head from moving so much.
On my 4D HD the magnetic head doesn't move at all. It just reads at one place as the space/time continuum take care of the data passing by and the quantum theory makes sure it's the correct data.
You can't handle the truth.
http://www.komag.com/technology/perpendicular_pmr. html
IBM sold out its hard drive biz to Hitachi a couple of years ago, because they projected the industry's profitability was nearing its end very soon. But Hitachi and others have continued the unprecedented pace of innovation, clearly finding profits to reinvest in R&D like this 3D tech. With apparently even shorter feature marketing cycles. Did IBM miscalculate the return on a continuing cash cow? Did they just make the same mistake selling their PC biz to Lenovo? Has IBM just sold itself out of the booming, strategically paramount PC business *again*?
--
make install -not war
Available by the end of the year, huh? That's shaping up to be a second-place finish for them. Still respectable, though.
Toshiba announced in December that products using this technology will go into production over the next six months.
...320k is the top bitrate in the mp3 standard and as such is inherently CBR - you can't go any higher (LAME --alt-preset insane is 320k CBR, unlike the other presets.)
Agree with you on the transparency issue, LAME APS is enough for me personally.
Also agree on the 'hard drives can never be too big' point - video in particular is the key driver here. One of the key advantages of FLAC however is that you can easily transcode into whatever new format you might like without having to re-rip all your CDs.
What will we have next? Superharddrive3D then Superharddrive3Dcolour Superharddrive3dcoulour pocket.
how do I visualise this? Data in jelly blubber with a read/write needle swimming through it? Data gets read out where two laserbeams cross?
Actually, what you describe exists. There's a team that was making, a decade ago, transparent gelatinous cubes containing bacteriorhodopsin, a light-sensitive protein similar to the light sensor in your own optical rods in your retina.
By indexing the cube with two different lasers simultaneously, you could cause the bacteriorhodopsin in an indexable 3D location to switch between two different conformations (foldings), or read fluorescence which indicated its' current configuration. Thus storing a rewritable bit in a small region of a 3D transparent cube of "jelly blubber". Data did in fact get read out "where two laserbeams cross".
I think the rapid growth of HD sizes, coupled with the fact that you have to keep the cube moist, is why they've not managed to make a marketable product yet. (Incidentally, allowing the cube to dehydrate would make the data unreadable. But, it didn't destroy it. If you rehydrated the cube, you could get the data back... which is kinda cool...)
Here's a link to
an early description of the technique from 1996.
I stole this sig from someone cleverer than me.
"With perpendicular recording, the magnetization is perpendicular to the plane of the disk, so the data remains stable because the magnetized units are head-to-tail, not head-to-head. This leads to greater reliability and stability. Another major advantage for perpendicular recording is that it should be possible to make it more finely-grained than longitudinal, which results in less noise when data is read." - Internal Newspost at the Hitachi Site
why waste that space when you can FLAC it?
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
the game itself is only one dvd. dvd 2 just has tutorials for making ingame content, and possibly a few extra apps (i remember possibly the learning edition of maya, a program to easily put faces on models, a program to paint directly on the model...)
Oh what marketing fluff. Headlines mention 2005, the first paragraph in the article says next year, and then the next paragraph says 2007. Which one should we believe? Toshiba is actually the first to bring the perpendicular recording technology to market. We are likely to see the 40GB and 80GB Toshiba drives with perpendicular recording technology in iPods real soon (June?).
The first application I thought of for one of these flash drives was to speed up the Page File. Comments in a recent slashdot article recommended putting your page file on a separate IDE channel if possible. So why not a dedicated flash drive? It would only have to be about twice the size of your physical memory and could be much faster than a conventional HDD.
I had to dig for some numbers. Bigger drives go faster apparently. At least one company (AdTron) has SATA drives that range in size-speed from
512 MBytes to 8 GBytes - 20 MBytes/sec
28 GBytes to 56 GBytes - 70 to 80 MBytes/sec
I can't find prices anywhere. SATA being the interface of choice for home use. Most of these drives seem geared for the server markets.
Regular HDDs can get up to 60 MBBytes/sec sustained apparently, so the flash drives don't look as impressive for speed as I'd hoped. The seek times should be 0 though. StorageReview.com seems to be down today for some odd reason. Too bad because I'd like to look there for more info.
...We have a hard enough time keeping track of our data already with just the two dimensions.
In perpendicular recording, data bits are aligned vertically, allowing for more data to be squeezed into a finite area^H^H^H^Hvolume.
"Perpendicular recording technology, in part, owes its heritage to Valdemar Poulsen, a 19th century Danish scientist who magnetically recorded sound in a similar fashion." One would think HD manufacturers would have thought of this sooner.
Before you know it, they'll be coming out with 9 dimensional hard drives that proves grand unification theory and pr0n somehow mix together to make a small scale big bang that creates a whole new universe stored in tissue paper.
He's making it up! "magnetic flux lines"? C'mon!
Sure took a long time. The concept of perpendicular recording is relatively old - I remember work being done on it back in days when Microsoft was a cute little monkey. Here is a nice link that explains the process: http://www.wtec.org/loyola/hdmem/02_03.htm/ Intel has a note on it - no date, but this is for floppies... http://support.intel.com/design/archives/periphrl/ docs/7281.htm
Toshiba is working on this technology:
http://www.nwfusion.com/news/2004/1214toshitous.ht ml/
The technology was used in tapes in 2002:
http://www.internetnews.com/storage/article.php/15 01631
Since they keep pressing the paramagnetic limit, at what point will you write a file, go on your way for a few months and come back to find the file unreadable? Will drives get to the point where the firmware will need to boost files once and a while (read the file, save it somewhere safe then rewrite it to disk to restrengthen the bits on the platter). I've already had this happen with really old floppies (ie the files were unreadable but I think in that case I couldn't even reformat it and reuse it.. the material itself goes bad.
How dare Hitachi leak information about the new "deathstars?"
Well, at least the exsplosions will be even cooler in 3-D.
Hey! Great artwork
But doesn't this just make the tracks wider? Whether you store:
Longitudinally on a 9x22 matrix
N S . S N . S N . N S
N S . S N . S N . N S
N S . S N . S N . N S
N S . S N . S N . N S
N S . S N . S N . N S
4x5 = 20 bits
or
Perpendicularly on a 9x22 matrix:
N S S N N S S N N S S
S N N S S N N S S N N
N S S N N S S N N S S
S N N S S N N S S N N
N S S N N S S N N S S
S N N S S N N S S N N
11x3= 33 bits.. alright. I eat my hat. I get it now. =)
it appeared in the lint trap of my clothes dryer along with a red sock that isn't mine.
The real question is will there be anything more than a 1 year warranty on drives using this new technology.
If not... how about you guys buy one and let me know in two years how it's going.
Give me back my sock!
[i]"120 G per square inch"[/I] Shouldn't that should be per [U]cubic[/U] inch?
Who would want a 3D drive anyway? My 2D drive is inifinitely thinner.
paintball
Now if they were cubes with goo inside, that would be cool. Or neon, like from Star Trek.
...made according to the BoBo the Dark Clown standard, or something different?
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
What, like Zip drives and Jazz drives? I remember a few people using those in college and every once in a while, you see a computer with one in it, but they were more expensive than the 1.44 MB floppies and it was highly dependent on the other person having the proprietary drive. USB keys are working much more nicely.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.