Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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
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
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...
I wouldn't see why not. You might have to put more logic on the drive to so but, hopefully that wouldn't reduce performance at all. Same idea as your system seeing a half dozen IDE drives as a single large drive with an RAID controller card, I suppose.
:)
And if not, it won't matter anyway. By the time these drives are released, the bugs worked out, better versions released, and then price reduced to an affordable range, they'll be making motherboards with whatever new bus interfaces is required.
All I know is, we've come a long way from punch cards or casette tapes.
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.
The platter employs string theory and rotates through 40 planes of reality.
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.
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
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?
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
OK, I found the article and headline a little short on hard facts, so did a quick search for a better explanation. You can find that here:s _5_23/ai_103731260
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0BRZ/i
The alleged move to 3D is something of a red herring.
It appears that with current longitudinal technology, each bit is encoded by a magnet with a North-South axis that lies in the same plane as the platter itself and occupies some 100 grains of the magnetic material. The novelty here is that in perpendicular recording, the magnet is stood on end with its North-South axis perpendicular to the plane of the platter.
Apparently this theoretically leads to greater areal densities of data exceeding that of the longitudinal technology. This is where the win occurs.
In particular, what initially confused me is that we are not talking about multiple layers of data within one platter. There is still only one layer of data per side per platter, but we have achieved greater areal density of that data. Exactly what that density will be once these drives are in production is anyone's guess.
Any help?
no time, no sig
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
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.
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.
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.)
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
It sounds like a cross between a hard disk and a Rubik's Cube:)
Organization: alphabetical, sometimes numerical or messy
The marketing droids turned "perpendicular" into "3D" to increase the hype level.
Yeah, they'll do that..
This advance will probably only give an incremental improvement in density. Sigh.
Well, it's a pretty big increment. It could be as much as 2X.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
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.
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
Normally on a disk the magnetic fields run flat along the top, like what would happen if you lay a series of pencils down on a notebook. Some of the pencils face one way and some the other. The different facing pencils represent a bit, either a one or a zero, depending on if they are facing left or right.
For a "3d" disk, take all of those pencils and stand them on end, so that they are either pointing towards you or down towards the paper. Now you can pack a lot more in there without (theoretically) bleeding over into eachother.
Personally I was hoping for some hypersensitive way to detect and manipulate multiple layers of magnetic media, like the name would imply. But overall this is a nice step forward in increasing density on a 2D platter.
The ______ Agenda
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.
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.
Sure, there are companies like IBM who put more money in to R&D than the GDP of a small Central American country, and they've been prototyping holographic drives and such for years. Yes, there were press releases, but they never said they were going to be releasing by year end.
Besides, this isn't some pie-in-the-sky technology, it's turning data stored on its side to data stored on its end...if they already having working prototypes in the field that are mass produced, why couldn't they put these on shelves by year end? I mean, it's not a new product, it'll just be the hard drive sizes we've been expecting for a while. Wouldn't surprise me if they started with 650GB in November/December and ramp up over a few years to 1.5-2.0 TB.
Oh, and also note that this isn't some no-name company (i.e. Bit Boys, Infinium) coming out with this release, it's one of the market leaders in hard drive technology (IIRC, Hitachi was the first to produce those CF-form-factor micro drives, even though they were IBM branded).
I don't think believing this makes someone a sucker; I think you're being a bit too cynical. But then again, any sucker would say that, wouldn't they?
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.
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.
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.
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?).
it appeared in the lint trap of my clothes dryer along with a red sock that isn't mine.