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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."
Think chickenhead - but horizontal, too.
I'm not sure, but I don't think so. I think that instead of using "magnetic fields pointing left or right (or forwards or backwards)" for 1 or 0, they will use "magnetic fields pointing up or down". Why does this make a difference, I hear you yell -- because the magnetic crystals are needle-shaped and the magnetic field points along the needle, so up/down packs them in more tightly.
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?