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Hitachi Predicts 3D Hard Disks by Year's End

Posted by timothy on from the denser-better dept.

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."

21 of 382 comments (clear)

  1. Either way. by Seumas · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

    1. Re:Either way. by atrizzah · · Score: 5, Funny

      I don't understand your technological mumbo jumbo. Could you please convert your figures to Library of Congress sized units?

    2. Re:Either way. by George+Tirebuyer · · Score: 3, Funny

      That's right. 640Gb should be enough for anybody.

    3. Re:Either way. by ocelotbob · · Score: 5, Funny

      He has enough pr0n to fill the library of congress 3 feet deep in spooge.

      --

      Marxism is the opiate of dumbasses

    4. Re:Either way. by jcr · · Score: 4, Funny

      Well, you can fit the entire senate in there, I'm sure...

      -jcr

      --
      The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
    5. Re:Either way. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      Yeah right. The 2.5 Tb of Pr0n is only the start. Then you need another couple of Tb for warez (or "legitimate backups of proprietary closed source software for which you have mislaid the original media" as it's known in the trade), one for your utterly worthless digicam pictures of your gimpoid loved ones, 100 years worth of pointless emails (complete with lame "joke" attachments) plus all that crap you've squirrelled away "just in case" but can't even be bothered to spring clean 'cause there's just too damned much.

      Add the same all over again for offsite storage and you get something like 3 Googlebytes (where a Googlebye is defined as the amount of stuff held by Goggle at some point or other in time)

      Hayzeus... How's a guy supposed to keep up ?

    6. Re:Either way. by vikstar · · Score: 2, Funny

      Hmm, you'll have to be more specific. How compressed should the Library of Congress be, or in what encoding? Setup a code where 0 is null and 1 represents the Library of Congress. Then the whole Library of Congress can be fit into a single bit, in this case on a 200GB hard drive you could store around 1600G Congress Libraries.

      --
      The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.
  2. But when... by ArtimusArchmage · · Score: 3, Funny

    When do I get my 4D Hard Disk?

    1. Re:But when... by datafr0g · · Score: 2, Funny

      In order to encode data along time, your HDD would need a flux capacitor to be able to go back in time to retrieve it... and they're not easy to come by.

      --
      "Who says nothing is impossible? Some people do it every day!" - Alfred E. Neuman
    2. Re:But when... by R.Caley · · Score: 5, Funny
      When do I get my 4D Hard Disk?

      I had one of those. Reading the same location at different times gave different results. It's not really very useful.

      --
      _O_
      .|<       The named which can be named is not the true named
    3. Re:But when... by PerspexAvenger · · Score: 3, Funny

      But imagine the seek times!

  3. I don't quite get it... by datafr0g · · Score: 5, Funny

    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
    1. Re:I don't quite get it... by twinmatrix101 · · Score: 5, Funny

      no, it means you can view porn in 3D

  4. I'd hazard a guess and say... by CdBee · · Score: 5, Funny

    ..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
    1. Re:I'd hazard a guess and say... by Trejkaz · · Score: 3, Funny

      Good, because I heard that Longhorn required one in order to fit the base install...

      --
      Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
  5. little difficult... by spectrokid · · Score: 3, Funny

    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

  6. Re:Seeking? by DrXym · · Score: 5, Funny

    The platter employs string theory and rotates through 40 planes of reality.

  7. Re:Imagine defragmenting one of these disks in XP by maxwell+demon · · Score: 2, Funny
    What sacrifices do you make to which dieties to ensure the power doesn't go out while it's in progress?

    Well, first sacrifice to the power deity. That is, switch off everything except your computer. This includes everything in your neighborhood, too (yes, your neighbours will get angry on you, but then, it's sacrificing, so it should hurt you a bit).
    Then, sacrifice to the god of information. For example by burning one of your favourite book (books not available anymore work best).
    And of course, you have to sacrifice to the goddess of fragmentation. After all, you de-fragment, so you should give her replacement fragments. Breaking an expensive glass will usually do. However, for heavily fragmented disks, you'll possibly have to break quite a few of them.

    Note that there's no guarantee that the deities (all three of them!) will accept your sacrifices. Also, there's a chance that another deity will interrupt power due to some independent reason, so make sure that you please those other deities as well.
    --
    The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
  8. Rubik's Cube by RandySC · · Score: 2, Funny

    It sounds like a cross between a hard disk and a Rubik's Cube:)

    --
    Organization: alphabetical, sometimes numerical or messy
  9. Re:Seeking? by operagost · · Score: 2, Funny

    I invented a 4D hard disk, but one day it opened a wormhole and disappeared. Good thing I made backups.

    --

    Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
  10. Re:Seeking? I have it by rubycodez · · Score: 2, Funny

    it appeared in the lint trap of my clothes dryer along with a red sock that isn't mine.