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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."
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.
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
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
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.
You already nailed the porn angle, which can absolutely eat up almost unlimited quantitties of storage.
You might be surprised at how much storage people require for their MP3 collections. Why, ripping just my collection of actual physical CDs that I personally own runs a couple hundred gig. Not to mention, if you backup your personal collection of legally owned DVDs to xvid, you could be using up a few hundred gig for a decent home collection.
And aside from those uses, think about the incredible amount of data that builds up over time if you're an avid digital photographer taking medium to high quality photographs. Or if you are scanning the family photo albums. Or if you like to keep your paper records light, so you scan them and shred the physical copies of documents older than three or five years.
Or if you make your own home movies or edit your band's music on your PC. Or if you're backing up the important data from all the machines in your own into a central location frequently.
Damn, even just a handful of videogames will eat up hundreds of gigs after awhile. Act of War, WarCraft, Unreal Tourney 2004, and TotalWar: Rome each take up between about 3gb and 6gb.
Granted, your grandmother and your youngest brother will probably not consume much space at all. But most geeks will - and in fact, as more tech becomes available to the world and actively used (like digital cameras have in the last few years), the average person will find that they need more and more storage.
I really feel we're going to hit a terrabyte sized consumer drive within the next three years. And even that might not be enough. Game manufacturers are only now starting to distribute more games on DVD format. Remember when games used to ship on one CD? Then three, four, five and even six over time? Well, today they can fit it all on a single DVD. Give it a couple of years when they start making games with enormous quantities of animation, live-action, cut-scenes, music... and we start seeing games that come on two, three, four or five DVDs. Imagine a 30gb game!
I might sound crazy, but a decade ago, a game that would take up more than a single 600mb CD seemed absurd.
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
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
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.)
The pick-up head has inertia due to the mass of a hefty ceramic magnet and several hundred turns of copper wire. There's a counterweight balancing it so that there is only a couple of grammes' weight bearing down on the record, but it has a hell of a lot of inertia compared to the steel shank of the stylus, which is attached to a very flexible coupling. So when the groove pulls the needle to the left, the needle moves left but doesn't take the whole pick-up head with it; the magnetic flux lines change and induce a current in the coils. The preamplifier has a relatively high input impedance, so the needle isn't actually doing much work generating electricity. Otherwise it would feel stiffer.
Side-to-side motion is the sum of left and right signals. Up-and-down motion is the difference. By using four coils, not two, and pulling cunning stunts with the wiring, you can create a sum and difference of the sum and difference signals without resorting to op-amps. Which, of course, gives you {more or less} the original signals
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
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?