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Hitachi Goes Perpendicular
Nimrangul writes "Hitachi has recently announced perpendicular recording with their harddrives, allowing for 10 times the data storage on a disk, meaning 20 G microdrives are on their way as soon as 2007. Hitachi is so pleased with this technological development that it has broken into song." This is, without a doubt, the most surreal thing I've seen today. Flash Required.
For the clueless among us, it looks like they're trying (and sorta failing) to emulate Schoolhouse Rock.
Before you skip over this as a dupe, you need to check out the flash animation.
Damn this thing screams a nerd verion of school house rock!
All the song and dance for that?
Nothing to see here
a working link: http://www.archive.org/download/dontcopythatfloppy /dontcopythatfloppy.wmv
sorry, here's a working link:2 0images/Get_Perpendicular.swf
http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/research/images/pr%
$ sudo emerge media-gfx/swftools2 0images/Get_Perpendicular.swf
# non gentoo users: http://www.quiss.org/swftools/
$ wget http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/research/images/pr%
$ swfextract --mp3 Get_Perpendicular.swf
$ xmms output.mp3
ex$$
I am running the same (Gentoo AMD64 64-bit) and my Opera runs Flash fine. Perhaps you should use it instead of or as addition to your 64-bit compiled firefox.
Linux is not Windows
That's because you're running a 32bit version of Opera with the 32bit Flash plugin. He is running a 64bit binary of Firefox, which can not use the 32bit plugin. If he used a 32bit Firefox, the Flash plugin would work for him too. I highly recomend you understand the technical issues before you engage in Opera fanboyism.
They're billing the initial market as microdrives, where access time shouldn't matter at all. For downloading lots of songs fast, or saving or uploading photos, what you need is high sustained speed. Seeking is infrequent, because media files are relatively big.
Have you seen Russian cartoons? Trust me, they make weird crap like that.
There's no place I can be, since I found Serenity.
People have been talking about perpendicular recording for 20 years, and if I recall correctly the big problem with all previous attempts was ensuring alignment between the heads. Previous attempts used a head on either side of the medium, and keeping those within micron tolerances would be well-nigh impossible.
Hitachi has a very small head writing the data, then the magnetic field lines diffuse through the medium, coming back out the same side in a much larger area that won't flip the bits at that point. Clever.
Thad Beier
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
Centipetal force isn't the only issue people have to contend with when things spin fast.
Vibration is also an issue - At 30k RPM, things have to be PERFECTLY balanced or the drive will vibrate itself to pieces.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) was making superior drives -- and far better arrays than both IBM and EMC -- *before* the purchase.
So why did Hitachi buy? IIRC, it was because they were interested in some of the patents.
Duh. Like he or she said, IBM was responsible for most of the advances in drive technology over the past 50 years.
This does not mean IBM was necessarily great at manufacturing drives.
It does mean this division has done great research. This is exactly why it has many widely used (and non-trivial) patents. It is not surprising that it continues to be the leader in magnetic storage research.
"...platter goes supersonic."
Fifteen thousand RPM on a 3.5" drive looks like 156 miles per hour to me, unless I've miscalculated. Hardly supersonic.
a,e,i,o,u and sometimes w and y (at be if of up cwm by)
In Japan, a lot of product manuals, corporate PR documents, and government documents are published in manga form. Morita Akio, co-founder of Sony onced asked his young female skiing instructor if she had read his autobiography Made in Japan. She told him "no, but I would have read it if it was a manga." So he had an artist adapt his book into manga form, naturally.
The informational manga genre was mostly spurred by the publication of A Manga Introduction to the Japanese Economy and A Manga History of Japan (Manga Nihon-no-Rekishi in the 1980s.
Here's a direct link to the SWF for archival purposes.
Thank goodness they've come up with a way to make HDs store more data!
Sort of.
;) Though the net effect would be simple randomness either way, so the real cause doesn't make a difference in the end.
;)
I believe the superparamagnetic effect involves recording bits on such small particles that some of them will flip polarity due to the ambient thermal energy - not because of the field effect of their neighbours (which are, after all, similarly small and weakly polarised). There are thermodynamic limits on information storage and transfer just like everything else, unfortunately.
Perpendicular recording gets around the problem simply by devoting more volume to each bit, down through the media layer - it's not somehow magically protecting each bit from the influence of its neighbours (in fact, in the perpendicular arrangement each bit is more closely packed with its neighbours - each pole is affected by two neighbouring poles, not just one). This is actually a given, since you are after all increasing the density of information in a physical space.
These were probably just technical oversimplifications for the cartoon, though they seem a bit regrettable. But then slight misinformation is part of the Schoolhouse Rock tradition.
Corrections to my corrections are welcome.
I think you're thinking of records. The magnetic bits on a hard drive platter are physical chunks of magnetic material. Yes, much like in the cartoon. Here's the required wikipedia article.