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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.
I strongly recommend it.
--
the strongest word is still the word "free"
For the clueless among us, it looks like they're trying (and sorta failing) to emulate Schoolhouse Rock.
I was waiting for this to be posted. I lerned this on betanews last night. I think that song was funny as hell. It will proly end up going down as one of them pop culture internet icons that enver die. Much like gostse.cx as somone already mentiond :)
You obviously don't check Newgrounds often. :)
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
Lord have mercy on our souls.... Disco Bits.... ::shudders::
I, for one, do not welcome our disco dancing bit overlords...
And, don't forget kids, GET PERPENDICULAR!!!
Yeah, that was pretty surreal, not Mini-Me-being-spanked-by-a-6-foot-tall-woman-on-VH 1 surreal, but more than enough for a drunken Friday night.
No, but I used to work for Microsoft.
In the post-9/11 world, all hard-drives are terroristicular. ;)
"All you have to do is be fragile and grateful. So stay the underdog." Chuck Palahniuk, Choke
No.
it lacked the fucking song and dance number.
HOLY FUCK WAS THAT CATCHY.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
In sovi.. Ah screw it, in Soviet Russia they don't make weird crap like that.
Someone help me.. I'm positive I'll be whistling the song for the rest of the day...!
Between this and Don't Copy That Floppy, I'm not sure how much more I can take....
Nicholas
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!
perpendicular recording.. like chess or is it checkers?
Anyone know who sings this?
This song will probaly stick in my head for weeks just like the "meow, meow, meow, meow" Meow Mix commercial jingle did. I am going to sacrifice a small hard drive as an act of contrition.
Robert Oschler - RobotsRule.com
Hitachi (ah, see, I remembered the brand) has succeeded in getting everyone to believe that they are on the cutting edge of hard drive technology. While that may or may not be true, the key point is that perception is being largely disseminated by a cartoon and not hard data or facts. Interesting.
---Technology will liberate us if it doesn't enslave us first.
All the song and dance for that?
Nothing to see here
I wonder if they can patent "a method of using disco music to make bits 'get perpendicular.'" Maybe if they crimp the disk, afterwards.
HOLY FUCK WAS THAT CATCHY.
Get perpendiculaaaar!
NO! It won't go away!
All comments are properties and trademarks of the voices in my head. Not like I'm gonna claim them.
And you thought Japanese companies are humorless??
Whoa. It's groovy, dude.
they want reliability
unless you are a fan of gambling with losing 200+gb of data that will die in 1-3yrs and with the price of a tape backup drive that can handle that amount of data being so high why even bother
digital data storage is so unreliable (cd rot, hard drives that die, flash memory has limited writes, any magnetic media) its not worth putting the effort into it, i dont want to keep writing my dvd's/cd's every 3 years cos the cd dye is unstable or my drive is going to die, thats bollocks
perhaps the message is , if you have anything worth doing, dont rely on using a computer to achieve it
Are you *kidding* me?
That was cool, catchy, geeky, original and quite imaginative, all at the same time.
I for one think it was really, really well done.
Get perpendicular...tra la la!
That's my new sig.
I'm dancing! I'm dancing!
This was insanely clever. Will be a cult video within days... You have to admit it does educate...
It's...in my head... Disco... Please... For the love of God... Someone help me! AAAAA...
So, how much faster can they spin the drives now with this improvement?
The 15k drives use smaller platters so they can withstand the stress of the high RPMs.
So what if you make them even smaller. The 36.6GB HD can potentially go up to 366GB now, but I think people would be very interested in a drive with smaller platters that goes 30,000rpm and is still 36.6GB.
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
Am I glad IBM sold their "moribund" HD biz to Hitachi. Even when funk and disco were king & queen of the dancefloor, IBM never had the balls to rip off "I'm Just a Bill" to enlighten us on superparamagnetism.
--
make install -not war
Try this, then.
Fuck Strongbad. *This* is what Flash was made for.
How much do you want to bet the price of these drives will get perpendicular too?
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
Oooo, you touch my Perpen-dic-ular,
Mmmm, my superparamagnetisms...
Authority questions you. Return the favor.
I felt like I was high wighout any drugs or side effects!!! Reminds me of school house rock, but it serves it's purpose. It explains a fairly complex concept to that the lay people can grasp it. Personally, I'll hold out for 30 gigs of flash memory. mmmm solid state.
--fetch daddy's blue fright wig, i must be handsome when i release my rage
get laid....
and is that why it's so geeky?
Find Japanese addresses in English on Google Maps Japan: http://diddlefinger.com/
I'm looking forward to watching the Saturday morning cartoon, seeing the crappy movie based on it, and buying the merchandise.
He did look a little like SpongeBob.
Dude, your name is DarkHelmet. This shit was practically made JUST FOR YOU...
i think it's more that most slashdot geeks are also goons.
excepting myself, i've seen something awful devour too many souls to give in =)
In Post 9/11 America, the bits have to stand up straight or terror will win.
Cool! Amazing Toys.
I only need one word to describe why I'll never buy Hitachi/IBM again:
Deathstar
The cartoon was cute and all, but what I'm wondering is if its really accurate or not. Are bits really these square pieces on a platter? I always had the impression that they were magnetic grooves in the platter (thus why you dont put a magnet near it). I don't see how you could make grooves perpendicular, so I guess I'm wrong. I did RTFA, but it would be great to see a better explanation of it!
Has started a Longhorn jingle and signed the creators of south park to direct it.
the other major news sites online and offline will all be talking about Hitachi's great technology to store 30 000 mp3's on the next ipod mini. A few bucks of marketing VERY well spent.
/.'s, never mind the general public, wouldn't be able to understand from a generic press release.
Double points for doing this with something so technical that most
In soviet russia hard-drives upgrades the size of YOU!
Emacs is good operating system, but it has one flaw: Its text editor could be better.
No, no, THIS is Goatse for the ears :)
...yeah - "Oh My God! You Killed Kenny" becomes "Oh My God! You Killed Another Feature!"
Will this increase power consumption significantly?
Any idea how much the platter needs to be thickened? Seems to me the added mass will require more power to spin, meaning more heat as well.
Or am I just nutty?
This is, without a doubt, the most surreal thing I've seen today.
:-)
And that's saying something.
(Seriously, though, that's actually a very good use of Flash. Now if only all Flash commercials were that cool.)
--GrouchoMarx
Card-carrying member of the EFF, FSF, and ACLU. Are you?
I just had to get this crap on my hard disk. Here's the direct download link: Get_Perpendicular.swf. A cool feature about flash movies is that they scale to the screen resolution, so you can watch it full screen. (The original web page specifies an absolute size.)
We have around 300g drives at the moment, does this nice 10x improvement mean we will see 3tb drives soon?
liqbase
Here's a mirror of the flash file. Works best by downloading the file, then playing.
20 gig rotating storage? or 20gig CF card? I know which one I would prefer in my mobile device. And prices are falling fast - my 1gig CF card in my axim will be replaced with a 4gig in the next couple of months... I shall not even be thinking about putting a microdrive in it.
...I obey the laws of physics....
sorry, here's a working link:2 0images/Get_Perpendicular.swf
http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/research/images/pr%
Atkins diet for bits 5 Minute Bits (video and DVD)
Just *how* do they get the bits to go perpendicular? The cartoon doesn't really tell me :-)
Patriotism is a virtue of the vicious
I love that fat guy, he rocks :)
In a horrible, car-wreck-eqsque "glad it's not me" kinda way... Like the starwars kid.
Send lawyers, guns, and money!
http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/research/images/pr%2 0images/Get_Perpendicular.swf
;-)
Please, take drugs b4 - I only had beer, but hey, it nearly worked. I recommend mushrooms.
cLive
-- Trinity in high heels carrying a whip: The donimatrix - there is no spoonerism
Larger and/or more efficient storage is nice. For me, however, hard drives are large enough for my purpses. I am more interested *faster* storage. Imagine if a hard drive could be accessed as quickly as RAM.
Get some.
you will be afterwards.
My boss has been calling me and demanding I get Perpendicular for years....and my memory hasn't improved one bit.
Never play chicken with a passive aggressive.
Hitachi: Because that law would be against the laws of physics. But if we changed the laws of physics...
bit: Then we could make all sorts of crazy hard-drives!
Hitachi: Now you're catching on!
bit: What if people say you're not good enough to be in the laws of physics?
Hitachi: Then I'll crush all opposition to me, and I'll make Isaac Newton pay. If he fights back, I'll say that he's gay.
... and then they built the supercollider.
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/3533
I guess you haven't heard the Free Software Song so far? :-)
They've 6 GB Microdrives today, and if Hitachi has 10x more space to get, why not 60GB in 2007 and not this paltry 20 GB? That's only 3x, not 10x. That's barely better than a Moore's Law type gain, and for disks, that's not that good at all.
... who thinks rotationg his ipod/hdd will make it store more songs.
If you have nothing useful to say post as AC.
AHAHAHAAaaaa this is funny!! Get perpendicular....
OMG! That was the best thing I've seen in weeks! Firstly, that took some time to come up with and it really works to explain the whole thing.
It was done with humor, decent music and good animation -- in short, Schoolhouse Rock style and it works!
How do I get that on tape to show other people?
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
No, the previous story was about the technology, this one is about it actually happening.
ROMANES EUNT DOMUS
There will no substantial speed improvement in relation to data transfer HOWEVER what will benefit is the seek time, thus giving the average user the apparence that their computer is running faster, when in reality, the time it takes for the machine to find the software and load it, is a lot smaller. With that being said, I've always wondered what people fill their hard disk with, considering that even I struggle to my 160gig hard disk (and 40gig hard disk residing on my server).
SWF File
That's OK, mod me offtopic... I did try submitting this as a story but don't have much hope...
Kudos to Hitachi, that was cool.
*shuffles off humming*
Get perpendicular... yeah baby
That was just too cool. A commercial I enjoyed watching.
Other companies should take lessons. At least try to entrtain me if you wish to market to me.
Sugapablo
four nine eighteen twenty-7 thirty-nine forty-7 fiftyeight sixty-nine seventy-9 eighty-8 one-hundred-and-nine one-twenty
Anyone remember "I'm Just a Bill" from Schoolhouse Rock?
Get more particular!
But really, who over 12 years could ever think this is a serious thing? I mean it is an hard disk not a toy. I understand that music player may be especially common between teenager, but this thing will make people think it is some sort of toy for babies.
At least there were no calamary involved...
Mu
I cannot wait for the competition to break out with their flash promos....LOL
When I first say that bit, laying on his back, I half expected him to start singing about how he was "a bill on a hill"...
Very awesome.
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
It's already the rage with the young kids. My 17 months son watched the whole thing through, and clapped along with the applause at the end (so cute! He's going to be geek, just like daddy!). If that's not proof positive that Hitachi is on to something, I don't know what is.
There ain't no rules here; we're trying to accomplish something.
I will be selling all of my shares at once! There is no place for humanity in a *serious* corporation!
Power to the Peaceful
Somewhere I have a magazine from when I was in high-school in the 80's that talks about the coming technology of Perpendicular Recording. BYTE or Popular Science or something like that. Man, that's a long gestation period... Around the same time, people were also talking about holographic storage on crystals. I think "bubble memory" has come and gone, but hopefully the data crystals are still on the way.
Well, that was just about the funniest thing I've seen so far this year. That makes me pretty lame I guess, right? In any case, I'm doing it -- I think I'm going to cut off the cable. No way they'll ever show content this quality on cable.
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.
>>Sig under construction
I'll never buy an Hitachi drive again. ;-)
Link for those who haven't seen it.
---southpaw
One song I can't get out of my head is bad enough.
TWO???
BASTARD!
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
It will take more energy to get it spinning initially, but once it's spinning, added mass has NO effect on how much energy is needed to keep something spinning.
Air resistance and other forms of friction are the dominant forces. (Although bearing friction will increase somewhat with heavier platters...)
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Get perpendicular...tra la la!
This sounds like the next slashdot meme.
Fantastic. And perpendicular. Except in Nebraska.
Actually, the bits should slant at 45 degree angle. This will allow them to run across the ground, but also to move straight up and down. It is important that they can straddle the slant between electromagnetic fields and words.
Due to financial difficulties, the light at the end of the tunnel has been turned off.
well i can understand why they made a song about it, its not everyday that something just suddenly sticks straight up. Well on second thought, i guess it depends on the gender, and uh, age of the person in question.
There is a fair amount of free music out there. Some of it is really good too.
Everyone is entitled to his own opinions, but not his own facts.
My name is Troy McClure. You know me from movies such as "Blue Rays do it in High Density" or "When Magnetism Becomes Gigantic".
Fight hunger. Filet a politician and send him to a 3rd world country of your choice.
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.
The previous article's comments included a completely erroneous post re: OS limitations on drive capacity, modded 5, informitive. The current OS based hurdle is 28-bit LBA. This means a maximum of 2^28 (27?) 512 byte sectors, for a total of 137 gig of addressable drive space.
48-Bit LBA went mainstream somewhere around '02, so on older hardware it's a crapshoot. The only windows versions that support it are XP and 2K with a service pack, and then only after adding a special key to the registry.
48-bit LBA should support up to about 137,000 TB, if my math is any good.
MR SPARKLE!!!!!!
So long as the hard drives themselves don't start singing..
Gentoo Linux - Wouldn't have it any other way. And fuck beta.
To be fair, yes, there is. =3 It would definitely be cool if more and more music on people's players was open-license music.
That said, somehow I don't think that's what they're talking about here. ^^;
( And wow I got modded Troll =D )
If you didn't know already, here's a link to the song (Dragostea Din Tei, by O-Zone) in the iTunes Music Store
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!
.. was somewhat like the way the "bill" character was presented in the Simpsons episode where Lisa was trying to get some bill approved/disapproved in Washington.
It was something to do with spoofing a campy 70's political cartoon. Were these cartoons real? Where do I recognize this style from? The "bit" in this video seemed familiar in terms of style.
Hey, Schoolhouse Rock worked wonders for me when I was learning my multiplication tables. And the preamble to the Constitution? Fuhggedaboutit...I can't recite it without singing it.
Personally, I'd love to see the folks who did the original Schoolhouse Rock make a comeback and do some new songs!
GET FREE APPLE STUFF!
Thats a lot of bandwidth to convey a simple message.
:
Here is the short version
I can fit 1 girl laying down in my bed.
If I got chicks to stand up instead, I could fit 10 in the bed at the same time.
woohoo !
* Q
P.S. If you don't get this note, let me know and I'll write you another.
Yes, imagine if slashdot started using these drives. All the bits of comments continuously shoved on the drive would start drifting towards the edge of the platter, and the eventually fall off. You could never have more than 50 comments on one page, because the older ones would already have disappeared!
True confidence comes not from realising you are as good as your peers, but that your peers are as bad as you are.
UC5608DWP -- LOWER CAPACITANCE 18-LINE 5V SE TERMINATOR FOR SCSI AND FAST SCSI.
We all needed to know this.
You're very welcome.
echo 33676832766569823265328479713269.8639857989Pq | dc
Maybe the Hitachi folks should stop singing and concentrate on shipping. On January 10 Hitachi announced the 500GB 7K500 drive would ship "first quarter 2005". It is now mid April, where is it?
Grown men weep to the egg song. I Love Eggs!
SAILING MISHAP
This is going to be as bad as that time I let Numa Numa Iei play all night... Thank god this one doesn't loop...
Go Actuator Man!!!
Actually We have 500 GB Drive available from Hitachi Right Now, So, you could have 5 TB (roughly, remember it is not technically 5 TB since they consider the next incrument as 1000 not 2 to the 10 (1024))
This means I'll be able to upgrade my 40GB iPod to 20GB real soon now...
Kind of catchy, really...
Karma: Oldschool
It's more just a down-market riff on "I'm Just a Bill" from Schoolhouse Rock.
pdb
"I'm Just a Bill" would be my guess to the specific inspirational clip for this one.
Gotta love (Old-)Schoolhouse Rock!
"Creativity is allowing ones self to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep" - Scott Adams