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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
$ 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
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?
"...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!
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.