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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."
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.
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.
Well, you could argue vinyl is still 2D. You have a distance along the groove and a "depth" in the groove.
"This is your life, and it's ending one minute at a time."
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
Don't see why not. IDE or SATA is merely the way the drive communicates with the motherboard. Currently you get many vastly different drive types that work on IDE.
2D or 3D, we still want to store the same kind of data, it just gets stored on a different medium.
East Coast Brewers
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.
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
It doesn't. Here is a more accurate description of how the technology works. The marketing droids turned "perpendicular" into "3D" to increase the hype level. This advance will probably only give an incremental improvement in density. Sigh.
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?
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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
These drives are not always for the personal user. There are these groups called Governments and Companies. They often have the need for more storage. And with RAID Drives having ultra dependable disks is not as important then cheap disks that store a lot. If the drive is 1/2 the cost of the other more dependable drive and it lasts 2/3 as long as the dependable drive, then the company made a good deal. With a good hotswap disk storage array that is setup properly all they need to do is pop out the drive and put a new one in, and many Raids will repopulate the drive.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Wasn't this behind the 2.88MB floppies? I bought my 486 with one, sure they'd replace the 1.44MB variety. Oops.
My guess would be that since 1982, they kept figuring out how to make conventional drives bigger and cheaper so there was no real need to spend the $ on R&D for new technology drives, now that drives are reaching their limmit, there needs to be a technology shift which is using an idea from the 80's.
I haven't lost my mind. It's backed up on disk somewhere.
Imagine taking a bunch of bar magnets and putting them in a chain, end to end. This is how it's normally done. Of course on a disk it's all much smaller and the magnets are just parts of the surface coating.
Perpendicular recording is like magnets that are perpendicular to the surface, meaning not end to end in a chain but with one of their poles pointing out of the surface and another pointing in.
So normal is ------- and perpendicular is |||||||. You can see how perpendicular recording can allow data to be packed in more tightly.
There are these groups called Governments and Companies. They often have the need for more storage. And with RAID Drives having ultra dependable disks is not as important then cheap disks that store a lot.
On what planet exactly? Traditionally Large businesses and governments have been the ONLY ones willing to pay more for more reliable hard drives. While it's true that RAID can improve the reliability of your storage solution it's not by any strech perfect.