Toshiba 40GB Perpendicular Magnetic Record Drives

freitasm writes "Toshiba is now shipping a 40GB 1.8" hard disk, the first in the industry based on the PMR (Perpendicular Magnetic Recording) technology. The disk stores 40GB in a single platter, and there are plans to release a 80GB version later this year. The first models are already being used on Toshiba's new Gigabeat MP3 players." It's all part of their plan to squeeze more bits onto the head of a pin.

Comments

FP and all that jazz

[BrianRaker]

No comments yet and already the server's dead. Good job :)

Re:FP and all that jazz

[bmeteor]

PhysOrg has an article on this as well

Re:FP and all that jazz

[freitasm]

It is working for me... I think it was just the initial load on the server.

Re:FP and all that jazz

[Deusy]

Perhaps it's running one of these new hard drives.

Re:FP and all that jazz

[empaler]

This should fix that for you

can't wait for the 1TB 3.5 inch version to arrive

[JPamplin]

Anyone know when?

Is 40GB the smallest you can buy now?

[saskboy]

Has anyone seen any hard drive available that's smaller than 40GB these days? I think it's becoming nearly impossible, and with the coming generation of this new technology, I guess it will be commonplace to see 120GB [or bigger] drives in every new computer.

Re:Is 40GB the smallest you can buy now?

[JFitzsimmons]

Read the fucking summary. The target for this would be miniscule devices like PDAs and portable audio players, where 40GB would be more than passable. Of course comptuers come with huge >120 GB harddrives, you can fit quite a number of platters into those (relativly) huge standard PC sized harddrive boxes.

Re:Is 40GB the smallest you can buy now?

[speeDDemon (nw)]

40Gb may be common in desktop computers, However a 1.8" drive is NOT common in desktop computers.

Re:Is 40GB the smallest you can buy now?

[Anonymous Coward]

iPod, Xbox HDs, various online shops, etc. Dumb Best Buy, Frys, and Walmarts however don't carry them anymore. The price to manufacture a drive anymore is nearly the same anymore weither you make an 80gig drive or anything below it. Only people that want something smaller are mainly looking to use it for a very specific purpose.

Re:Is 40GB the smallest you can buy now?

[Eightyford]

Easy, killer.

Re:Is 40GB the smallest you can buy now?

[jamesh]

I think 36gb drives are fairly common in the SCSI product space, and maybe 18gb drives are still obtainable without too much effort.

But in the IDE world, 40gb is about the smallest you'll get. Of course in the 1.8 inch market, 40gb is on the high side which is the whole point of this article.

Re:Is 40GB the smallest you can buy now?

[saskboy]

Calm down. I take it you didn't see my point, that if this technology works for mini-drives, they'll likely use it to boost things in the desktop to way past 40GB in even low end systems.

Re:Is 40GB the smallest you can buy now?

[MsGeek]

The ThinkPad X-series uses 1.8" drives to cut down on weight and size.

Re:Is 40GB the smallest you can buy now?

[alvinrod]

It's no longer feasible for a company to bother producing a 3.5" HD smaller than 40GB any more. At a certain point, it doens't get any cheaper to make a hard drive regardless of the amount of memory you put on it. A company could probably produce a 8 MB HD if they really wanted to, but it really wouldn't be much cheaper for them to do than a 40 GB hard drive.

In fact, it would almost certainly cost more if they tried to make a hard drive that had exactly 8 MB of space and no more because the parts for it are no longer mass produced. The easiest way would be to make a 40 GB hard drive and seal off everything after the first 8 MB. Of course who in the hell wants a 8 MB hard drive anyhow?

If you're an Apple person, then you're already likely seeing 120 GB drives as standard if you own an iMac or one of their other top tier computers. The same is probably true if you buy a gaming rig from Alienware or some other company that specializes in high performance computers.

As technology progresses to the point where it's easy and cheap to cram 120 GB into a hard drive then they will become more standard as we pave way towards bigger and bigger drives. Do most people really need 120 GB hard drive? Not really, in my opinion, but it'll be nice for the Google's of the world who want to give us 2 GB of inbox space.

Of course, people will continue to become more tech savvy and start to put more digital photographs and eventually videos on their computers. 40 GB can hold a lot of pictures, but 120 GB is better suited for having a lot of video content stored on your hard drive.

In 10 years we'll likely be measuring drive sizes in TB instead of GB, laughing about the days when computers only came with 40 GB HDs and single core processors, kind of like how we laugh about how computers from the 80's had HDs that measured in MBs and RAM that measued in KB!

Re:Is 40GB the smallest you can buy now?

[ColaMan]

It's no longer feasible for a company to bother producing a 3.5" HD smaller than 40GB any more

Unless they stuff it with simms and battery-back it.
And then it's very feasible to suddenly have a (say) 8GB drive with 133MB/s sustained xfer and sub-ms "seeks"

Re:Is 40GB the smallest you can buy now?

[Anonymous Coward]

What would be a neat idea is to have the hardware do its own raid effect with something like a two platter 120gb drive, you can clone the platters and run it as a 60gb drive. I don't think that would be a hard thing for a manufacturer to set up

Re:Is 40GB the smallest you can buy now?

[Anonymous Coward]

mmm Maxtor has announced that their 500GB drive will be available this fall. They are not using the perpendicular technology, but when they do, these drives will be able to hold 5TB. 4 of these drives in the old desktop will allow you 20GB for your documents and letters (never PrOn, never, never, never!!!) I remember when I first heard about drive manufacturers getting perpendicular, in fact I heard about it on /. and you can still see the informative Schoolhouse-Rock style video at http://f0rked.com/flash/v=get_perpendicular
(it's informative, and disturbing at the same time).

Re:Is 40GB the smallest you can buy now?

[corsec67]

That wouldn't help you if the any of the motors died, since all of the heads are actuated togeather.

Also, if you get dust in the disk, all of the platters would be ruined in short order.

I do have a disk that has one failed hard drive platter, but I don't trust any of the other platters. (I store /usr/portage on the platter that works.)

Aside from that drive, which I think is quite rare, most hard drive failures take out the whole drive.

Re:Is 40GB the smallest you can buy now?

[timecop]

You mean the Gigabyte i-RAM disk?

Only 4gb max though, but this appears as standard SATA drive to your system, you can boot from it, load OS, etc. Pretty good priced too (without memory).

Re:Is 40GB the smallest you can buy now?

[blackomegax]

yeah. i cant wait for the 80gb version of this for my X40. HOPEFULLY it will be 5400 rpm as well. but...the data density should make up for it if its not

Re:Is 40GB the smallest you can buy now?

[eosp]

yeah, that gives me a setup idea. a bunch of these small drives in a raid array. nice, fast, reliable, and cheap.

Re:Is 40GB the smallest you can buy now?

[fredistheking]

Western Digital still makes 8GB drives for XBOX. These are really 20GB platters that have been short stroked to 8GB since microsoft wants uniformity. In reality these are 80GB platters that didn't make it. Western Digital doesn't produce any drives with less than 80GB platters now. All the 80GBs that you find commonly in Dells are single platter.

Re:Is 40GB the smallest you can buy now?

[shmlco]

"Do most people really need 120 GB hard drive? Not really..."

Speak for yourself. Every time I go out shooing my digital camera I come back with a couple of 1GB flash cards full of photos. Doesn't take many trips to completely and totally fill a 120GB drive...

Re:Is 40GB the smallest you can buy now?

[Guspaz]

Do most people really need 120 GB hard drive? Not really, in my opinion,

Which is why this matters more for smaller drives. Take notebook drives as an example. 5400RPM drives top out at 120GB, and for a small fortune, might I add. If you want to go 7200RPM in a notebook, 100GB is the largest available, and it'll set you back something like $440 USD. Perpendicular recording has the potential to significantly bring down notebook drive cost-per-gig. Not to mention the benefits for 1.8" and 1" drives.

Re:Is 40GB the smallest you can buy now?

[jpmkm]

That's the worst idea I've ever heard.

Re:Is 40GB the smallest you can buy now?

[vikks]

Just a side note: I recompress all taken .jpg pictures to 50% quality. Distortion is acceptable for me (difference is only notable in at least 200% zoom) and size goes down about 5 to 10 times. Really saves quite a lot disk space. I even wrote program to automate this compression process.
As for mp3's - my collection grows slower and slower and by now takes about 40G. Only video data can (over-)fill 160+G hdd for average user.

Re:Is 40GB the smallest you can buy now?

[periol]

Of course, people will continue to become more tech savvy and start to put more digital photographs and eventually videos on their computers. 40 GB can hold a lot of pictures, but 120 GB is better suited for having a lot of video content stored on your hard drive.

You're missing the market for these. One hour of recording high-definition television is approximately 10 GB of data. A 300 GB drive only gets you 30 hours of recorded television. I really believe that we're going to be moving towards a stronger split in computer systems, with some marketed as entertainment hubs (in whatever form) and others marketed for utility. In that world, 100 hours of high-def home videos consumes a TB.

We'll want bigger hard drives.

Re:Is 40GB the smallest you can buy now?

[mcrbids]

In 10 years we'll likely be measuring drive sizes in TB instead of GB, laughing about the days when computers only came with 40 GB HDs and single core processors, kind of like how we laugh about how computers from the 80's had HDs that measured in MBs and RAM that measued in KB!

Really?

If this is true, where are the 5 Ghz CPUs we're supposed to have now? Oh, you don't have any? Well, there's "dual core" CPUs, there's "dual proc" systems, but there's still no CPUs much over 4 Ghz?

You can't grow exponentially forever. There are limits to how much information can be embedded into a 3"*5"*1" cube. No, we're nowhere near the theoretical limits, but we are probably approaching the limits of what our MR HDD technology can achieve, since we're moving to perpendicular technology as our technology matures.

The conputer industry, 1975-2005. It's been fun, it's been exciting, but it's maturing fast.

Re:Is 40GB the smallest you can buy now?

[diablomonic]

How about from a performance not reliability (IE striping not redundancy) point of view, you could greatly improve transfer speed by striping across multiple platters !

Re:Is 40GB the smallest you can buy now?

[el_womble]

When I bought my G5 I genuinely didn't know what I was going to do with 160GB of storage. Soon found out, PVR is a killer storage app. Once my storage is in the TB range my DVD collection is going on my PC and getting piped around the house like my music. Once my storage is in the PB range my then Bluray collection is going online as is my XBOX/Playstation etc collection as the emulators get good enough to be usable, so that I don't have to have the ugly boxes under my nice HiDef screen.

There is no such thing as enough storage.

Re:Is 40GB the smallest you can buy now?

[stupid_is]

Get yourself an XBox 360 accessory for $60ish - 20GB drive

Re:Is 40GB the smallest you can buy now?

[adam1101]

> The ThinkPad X-series uses 1.8" drives to cut down on weight and size.

Specifically the X40 series, the X30 series still use 2.5" drives, which are bigger but have many advantages. They're much faster, bigger, cheaper, and most importantly, there is competition from different manufacturers (Hitachi, Toshiba, Seagate, WD, Samsung, Fujitsu, all interchangable). With 1.8" drives you're basically stuck with one manufacturer for a given laptop.

There are only two 1.8" HD manufacturers, Toshiba and Hitachi, and they use incompatible connectors. The Toshiba looks like a shrunken 2.5" drive, while Hitachi uses the same connector from the 2.5" drive mounted on the side of the drive. The IBM X40 uses the Hitachi connector, while Dell uses the Toshiba in the Lattitude X1. I think most ultraportable laptops with 1.8" drives use the Toshiba connector, but as they rarely mention the HD manufacturer, for each model you'd have to find someone who has opened it to find out. Same thing for media players, I'm pretty certain iPods use Toshibas while the Rio Karma has the Hitachi drive. To make matters even more confusing, Hitachi has introduced another incompatible connector for 1.8" drives ("ZIF connector"), which seems to be mainly marketed to media player manufacturers.

Re:Is 40GB the smallest you can buy now?

[Fweeky]

Track density is way too high to align more than one head at a time with a single actuator.

Re:Is 40GB the smallest you can buy now?

[fbjon]

Yes, I do this same compression for photos that aren't really nice or otherwise interesting. Those photos that fall in between "pointless=>delete" and "hah, this is great!". I do it by reducing the resolution though, instead of by making massive jpeg artifacts, usually to 1280x960 or 1024x768. Still acceptable to print or display on a monitor, but only barely.

Re:Is 40GB the smallest you can buy now?

[fbjon]

How do you tell the drive to store only on one platter? As far as I know, they start at the outer edge, slowly progress through the sectors towards the inner edge with the final sectors innermost, having progressed through all the platters simultaneously.

Re:Is 40GB the smallest you can buy now?

[Anonymous Coward]

> yeah. i cant wait for the 80gb version of this for my X40. HOPEFULLY it will be 5400 rpm as well. but...the data density should make up for it if its not

You'd have to wait for Hitachi, the Toshiba won't fit in the X40.

Re:Is 40GB the smallest you can buy now?

[freitasm]

"They are not using the perpendicular technology, but when they do, these drives will be able to hold 5TB. 4 of these drives in the old desktop will allow you 20GB for your documents and letters... "

You certainly mean 20TB?

Re:Is 40GB the smallest you can buy now?

[wed128]

Good idea, put a raid controller in a firewire enclosure, then slap 4 of these little guys in a raid 5. Looks just like any other firewire drive to the computer, but it's got stripes and parity!

Re:Is 40GB the smallest you can buy now?

[networkBoy]

"Once my storage is in the TB range my DVD collection is going on my PC and getting piped around the house like my music."

I'm already ndoing this, using xboxes and XBMC as a front end and a punny linksys NSLU2 as a media server. It can serve up to 4 video streams at the same time (any file, any offset) without problems.
Files are encoded in MP4. Saves me from re-buying overpriced Disney DVDs when my daughter gets hold of them.
-nB

Re:Is 40GB the smallest you can buy now?

[el_womble]

I love XBMC, but I also love XBox Live. Now I have neither as my modchip blew and took out the usb-controller.

If Microsoft were serious about selling Xbox 2 they would use XBMC as the default dashboard. Hell, I was tempted to replace my Xbox purely for that reason and then buy games as a 'well it can do that too' sort of thing. Its a real shame that you have to depend on the work of grey hats to get real functionality out of machine you forked out $300 for and at the cost of using Xbox live.

Re:Is 40GB the smallest you can buy now?

[Anonymous Coward]

When I was making my website, I was really amazed at how far I could crank down the quality for a JPEG and still have an acceptable look. My website is so small now, that my web host's bandwith limit is essentially 'infinite'. PNG at max compression can't even come close, not even by a factor of 10, sometimes.

As a sidenote, it also makes it less likely for people to steal my images...some JPEG artifacts are actually a good thing for me :)

Re:Is 40GB the smallest you can buy now?

[codifus]

The shame here really is, we'll be laughing but the newer techs will be less and less apreciable of just how massive their hard drives are. Jeez, today's 120 GB drives are stupendously generous. My colleague complains of running out of space on his 400 GB HD. Well, all that video you've been storing, most of it just un-watched and being kept for no particular reason might have smething to do with it. CD

Re:Is 40GB the smallest you can buy now?

[MullerMn]

It's expensive to be a voyeur in these digital times.

Re:Is 40GB the smallest you can buy now?

[edsterino]

In fact, it would almost certainly cost more if they tried to make a hard drive that had exactly 8 MB of space and no more because the parts for it are no longer mass produced. The easiest way would be to make a 40 GB hard drive and seal off everything after the first 8 MB. Of course who in the hell wants a 8 MB hard drive anyhow?

No, it does not cost more to produce smaller drives. If the capacity is within a generation, head and media makers will usually be able, and happy, to produce these parts - likely with significantly higher yields and lower production costs (decreasing the cost). Even if you use the current generation parts, you still might save money as you will need only one disk and one head - which are by far the most expensive parts of a drive. After that, they destroke the drive so that you only use some percentage of the surface. As long as the capacity is greater than one track, you can get there by destroking.

Destroking is very common. It is frequently done for companies that use hard drives in their products. They'll buy current product yet ask for it to be destroked to a fraction of it's actual capacity because they don't want to modify their firmware or test process.

Re:Is 40GB the smallest you can buy now?

[filmotheklown]

1 hour of HD at 10gigs is highly compressed HD. The prosumer, highly anticipated Panasonic HD camcorder records 1080i at the rate of 100mbit/second. This works directly with Final Cut Pro on a Mac G5. (12.5MB/second) If I'm not mistaken, uncompressed 4:2:2 HD is about 180MB/sec. If you want to go real crazy, you use one of the newer Arri Cam D20s or Thomson GV Viper camera. They record 4:4:4 RAW mode "aka FilmStream" (so you don't loose anything in the HD video space conversion.) You can't even record to tape directly, you have to use a big ass disk array. (The Viper was used to record about 60% of "Collateral"). This creates a datastream of about 3gigabit/second. So yes, hard drive space will be used and quickly when it comes to HD

Re:Is 40GB the smallest you can buy now?

[blippy]

we laugh about how computers from the 80's had HDs that measured in MBs and RAM that measued in KB!

Maybe the joke is on us, though. Maybe it's the software that needs improving, not the hardware. And of course, nobody tells us how we're supposed to back up all this crap.

Re:Is 40GB the smallest you can buy now?

[BRonsk]

The GP is talking about 8MB, not 8GB...

Obligatory geek link - get perpendicular!

[SD_92104]

Even though the following is from Hitachi, it is still entertaining (and maybe we can bring down their server too...)

Get Perpendicular!

Re:Obligatory geek link - get perpendicular!

[Satavahana]

Do we really need these hard drives? What we need is tiny and light MP3 players with internet refill stations like trains, coffe-shops and parks? That way you don't have to keep each and every song you ever want to listen in a device - just keep them in the internet and download a playlist whey you want.

Re:Obligatory geek link - get perpendicular!

[b5turbo]

That was about as bad as the old "Don't copy that floppy!" commercials from way back in the early 90's.

Re:Obligatory geek link - get perpendicular!

[cnerd2025]

Since when did the "Bill" from the old School House Rock become the "Bit"? That has got to be one of the unintentionally funniest things I've seen. It reminds me of Jurassic Park when the tour video introduces "Mr. DNA" or whatever, that explains the process of cloning dinosaurs.

Re:Obligatory geek link - get perpendicular!

[syphax]

I cannot believe the suits at Hitachi approved this. Good for them- we need more random creativity from the corporate world.

Re:Obligatory geek link - get perpendicular!

[HatofPig]

Um... I don't think that it was "unintentional", since the whole joke was that it was like a School House Rock video, and that Bill is probably the most famous character from school house rock.

Re:Obligatory geek link - get perpendicular!

[Just-some-person]

Keke I remember this from StumbleUpon ^^
A great way of spreading information.

Re:Obligatory geek link - get perpendicular!

[g0sub]

Hint: Look for the irony

Re:Obligatory geek link - get perpendicular!

[Kinetix303]

Time is expensive and data transfer is slow.

Yes, we need the hard drives.

Re:Obligatory geek link - get perpendicular!

[Anonymous Coward]

Bill is probably the most famous character from school house rock.

Timer's gonna bust a cap in his ass for that one, Holmes.

Re:Obligatory geek link - get perpendicular!

[TheStonepedo]

If you mute the flash animation and begin playing it at exactly 1 minute 5 seconds into the album Dark Side of the Moon...

Informative Video

[linux_warp]

There is a great flash video that explains perpendicular recording, with music no less, at http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/research/recording_h ead/pr/PerpendicularAnimation.html
produced by Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, for the curious as to how it actually works.

Re:Informative Video

[Mr. Maestro]

Am I the only one who thought I was having a flashback to the old Saturday Morning cartoon lessons?
http://www.school-house-rock.com/Bill.html

Re:Informative Video

[Anonymous Coward]

Am I the only one who thought I was having a flashback to the old Saturday Morning cartoon lessons?yes

Re:Informative Video

[mr_zorg]

Um. Wow. I wonder how much THAT cost them...

Re:Informative Video

[Anonymous Coward]

I think this song (http://www.school-house-rock.com/Softw.html) is responsible for destroying some kids' future ability to program.

Re:Informative Video

[Rickler]

Did I hear right when it said data will only last 1,500 hours? Or was that 1,500 hours of music?

Re:Informative Video

[Anonymous Coward]

Um I just saw this exact link above this. Did they just not notice the double post. And what makes one post more funny than the other? Just curious

Re:Informative Video

[Anonymous Coward]

This is one of the mysteries of slashdot moderation. On occasion, they have been known to moderate four to five essentially identical messages the same way, without even touching the 'Redundant' tag. Nevertheless, we continue to trust them to tell us what is funny and what is not, who is insightful and who is not.

Get Perpendicular

[DaNasty]

Woo Woo
Get Perpendicular

Faster...

[eviltypeguy]

Anyone know what the performance of these "perpendicular" drives will be like compared to today's accepted methods?

Re:Faster...

[qbwiz]

The areal density will be greater, so at the same rotational velocity the peak data transer rate should be around 1.15 ( sqrt(133/100) ) times as high as before. Seek times might also be reduced (for the same amount of data on the disk), but when both drives are full, I think the seek times would both be the same.

Re:Faster...

[qbwiz]

Now that I think about it some more, the actual speedup will be either .33 (if the bits used to be parallel to the direction of travel of the head), or nonexistant(if they used to be perpendicular).

Re:Faster...

[Wireless Joe]

Anyone know what the performance of these "perpendicular" drives will be like compared to today's accepted methods?

When I had a perpendicular drive installed in my current mp3 player (at significant expense I might add), I immediately noticed it produced a richer, warmer tone with better bass response and aural clarity. There was some fading off in the midrange, but overall a very satisfactory listening expierence.

Oh, wait...

Re:Faster...

[BJH]

Did you try putting it in the freezer?

Re:Faster...

[Anonymous Coward]

What I'd love is if someone supplied a set of these in a couple of RAID configurations. Each disk would have a green LED for GOOD, a red one for BAD.
If one is bad, just pop out the drive and replace - it will rebuild automatically.
No visable OS - this would be an appliance.

Is there anything like this for home use already (I think LaCie have one)

Re:Faster...

[ashitaka]

Coloring around the outside of the case in green highlighter will fix the midrange.

Re:Faster...

[medgooroo]

Which is why you werent on the design team for the flash advert mr science man. http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/research/recording_h ead/pr/PerpendicularAnimation.html (in case anyone has somehow managed to evade it)

Re:Faster...

[wowbagger]

You obviously need to replace that nasty transistor based output with a tube - that will improve the midrange as well as the spatial imaging.

You also need the oxygen-free copper, extra-virgin yak-wool insulated monster headphone cable to preserve the Mhz transients.

More links

[Earlybird]

Link is down, so here are more news articles, courtesy of Google News.

Re:More links

[Anonymous Coward]

Just slow, but not down...

Magnetic Media

[Choad Namath]

This is great and all, but I kind of hope that we reach the limit for magnetic hard disks soon so we're forced to come up with a better replacement. Magnetic storage is way too slow.

Re:Magnetic Media

[Jeff DeMaagd]

This is great and all, but I kind of hope that we reach the limit for magnetic hard disks soon so we're forced to come up with a better replacement. Magnetic storage is way too slow.

I really don't think you understand, it is all about trade-offs. Magnetic is the best there is for capacity and cost, unless you think you can afford a 500GB flash drive. Actually, I think Flash drives might have much lower latency, but the best I've seen has a tenth the peak transfer rate of the fastest hard drive.

Re:Magnetic Media

[Anonymous Coward]

IIRC flash actually gets faster transfers at higher densities due to greater parallelization. So it's a problem that may "solve itself" as long as flash continues to grow....and capacitywise they're already are where hard drives were ten years ago...though I think the transfer time is still comparatively much worse.

40GB?

[dal20402]

This isn't big news until they're using this technology on drives with more than one platter... I want my 120GB MP3 player, dammit.

But I know we'll be hearing about it here on /. when we get perpendicular 3.5" drives. OMG 1.5TB pr0n!!1

Re:40GB?

[AussieVamp2]

I agree, my 40GB is full. 120 would be a nice upgrade. :)

Re:40GB?

[Jeff DeMaagd]

This isn't big news until they're using this technology on drives with more than one platter... I want my 120GB MP3 player, dammit.

You can probably get that by buying a clunky-large brick of a player that uses the 2.5" laptop drives, such as the full sized Nomad Zen. Then you swap out the drive with the new 120GB laptop drives.

Re:40GB?

[goldspider]

And every byte is in legal, bought-and-paid-for music, right?

Re:40GB?

[dj245]

It seems obvious to me they just haven't got the fabs for the new process up yet. Otherwise we would be seeing rollouts for noteboook hard rives and 2.5" server hard drives as well. The small 1.8" fab probably is a prototype fab for building the bigger ones. As for the ultra-huge hard drives, there may not even be a market for them aside from the tiny fraction of us who horde everything. When it takes a day to copy a drive at 30mb/s then the drive isn't so useful.

Re:40GB?

[AussieVamp2]

Yep. Between my wife and I we have hundreds of LPS, hundreds of CDs and hundreds of tapes.

All been digitised.

Re:40GB?

[Sir.Grok]

That is what I did with my 20GB Neuros. I work at a computer shop and when one customer had their laptop harddrive upgraded from an 80GB drive to a 100GB one, I got the drive (the fool didn't want the drive). I went home and got a 400% disk space increas (which I just use as portable hard drive space... only 30 GB of that is music)

Re:40GB?

[AussieVamp2]

oh, plus the 1100 odd and growing tracks from Irateradio and Indy.tv

Hence the lack of space.

Even threw away the Yoko Ono album my mother in law bought the spousal unit many moons ago.

Same thing with a Chris Jagger a friend bought her as a (bad) joke.

Re:40GB?

[phobos13013]

Come on... do you REALLY NEED 120GB of music on one device? Let me put it to you this way, do you need (i mean need not want, and by need i mean have enough music to fill it up at this moment) 6 ipods? I actually easily have this much music but come on, the amount of time to listen to it all would be in the range of months! I find even on one of my little 20GB players i sit there for 10mins flipping through directories trying to decide what to play... 120GB would only increase the amount of time i would take to decide.
At any rate, there have been 100GB players available for awhile now, most notably the XClef 500. Though i believe it uses a 2.5" HD. So now yr one ipod short.

Re:40GB?

[dal20402]

Smart... but I want 120GB the size of a *matchbook*!!!! Waaaah!!! Incompetent engineers!!!

Seriously, I want my capacity, but not *that* much. The compressed version of my collection is about 85GB; until there's an iPod-or-smaller machine that big I'll just make do with my 60GB iPod.

Re:40GB?

[kesuki]

who says 30/MB second? that's the data rate of the 1.8 inch drive. i'm going to assume that a full 3.5 inch should be able to sustain 200-400 MB/sec depending on platter rotation. (200 MB/sec for 5400 rpm, and 400 MB/sec for 10k rpm) this is of course, only applicable for platters that have 10x the arial density, hitachi is currently only planning a drive that uses 2x the areial density, so it should only be 40-80 MB/second. of course... SATA II can only handle 300 MB/sec for all SATA 2 devices connected, and the sata Spec was only engineered around a theoretical peak of 600 MB/sec... and then you have the limitations of the FSB etc etc..

the reason why they're going 'slow' with the perpendicular technology is because well, they've been stuck at 100GB/platter for a loong time now and they want a good 5 step 10-30 year migration to the full 1 tb/platter configuration. so they can 'keep the upgrade cycle' going. fortunately, we already have UHDV taking a good 3.5 TB per 18 minutes so those 5 TB drives will be sure to be made obsolete whenever 400 TB (40 hours UHDV) rewriteable multi layer holographic media is designed for hard drive use (ie: near instant random data seek, multi point lasers to acheive HD comperable data thruput rates etc.)

Re:40GB?

[dj245]

ha. Its not the interfaces nor the drive density thats holding the speed back, its the head mechanisms. Drives today can't even fill ATA100 let alone SATA I (or II). Find me a single drive that can sustain 70mb/s and I'll eat my hat.

Re:40GB?

[bmeteor]

well this is pretty short sighted. History has shown that the arts advance with every technological advancement. Certainly we'll need 120 gb of data when we get 5.1 audio for recorded music, even with a lossless compression format. I'm sure working dj's who are using Flac would need that much space to hold a selection of their library at least for one night.

Re:40GB?

[nathanh]

And every byte is in legal, bought-and-paid-for music, right?

I have 26GB of legal 192kbps OGG ripped straight from my CD collection. Once you throw on podcasts and a backup or two, that 40GB doesn't go very far.

Re:40GB?

[phobos13013]

Granted. And i think you especially with not even with since shn and flac albums go well over a couple hundred megs but my point is at this stage of the game there is just no need let alone a motivation for these companys to want to produce a 120GB or 200GB player since most people are running around with a half filled 20GB player today! See these companies are building for today except for the exceedingly small R&D departments which are building concept not next-gen. They arent going to mass produce a 200GB player for 50 djs in rotterdam who want a lossless codec. You better be able to sell a couple million units minimum before that happens. Especially at the price of that kind of tech TODAY! I mean didnt Fujutisu JUST make a 120GB 2.5" drive for the first time like a few months ago?!

Re:40GB?

[bmeteor]

I see your point for the mass marketed mp3 players, and that's why there's the hard drive capabilities as well as the image and impending video storage.

but I'm sure someone will make a high end player with tempo, and pitch control, a huge hard drive, a lossless codec/aiff, software to run it, and slap a huge margin on it, and it would still sell like hotcakes. you ever seen a wedding dj's gig bag? Even the house dj's here in chicago would find a great use for it. You probably wouldn't sell a million, but probably could get away with couple a hundred thousand, at a much larger margin (pro Music equipment margins are HUGE). It depends on the market.

Alternatively, speaking of video storage, an average dvd movie weighs in at 9 gigs? that's only 8 movies with a 80 gig and 12 with a 120 gig. A videoPod would need that kind of capacity, at the very least. In my eyes that'd be the next killer app. (think grabbing the last show from a tivo, or renting a video podcast from blockbuster.

Re:40GB?

[phobos13013]

I dont know im kind of reluctant to go down that route with the VideoPod as you so creatively call it :) (being not too into ipods i like to call it the Personal Media Player, PMP). Only because to really enjoy it you have to at LEAST have a 5" screen... but thats LCD which if it breaks yr out of a schtload of money, good luck with a warranty on that. So the design could be clamshell, now you nearly doubled your width. So now you are carrying around this big bulky piece of junk just to whip out and maybe get 15-30mins of viewing time in on a commute or something, unless its a plane, but come on who doesnt ride on a plane with a 5" screen staring you in the face anyway? And come on, its portable so you better not be watching that thing at home?! It just doesnt seem what it would be worth to buy.
As for the large capacity player, heres all you have to do if you really want one, buy the XClef i linked in my first post (399USD), buy that fujitsu 120GB drive from the last post (~250USD), slap it in there. Now you have that 120GB pod original poster was screaming about, it cost you ~650USD. Dont see what the big deal is was my point. And if it got mass produced its gonna cost that much AT LEAST, so there you go. Tomorrows technology today :).

Re:40GB?

[bmeteor]

on this PiMP thing you talk about. I'd always envisioned it as a portable that can drive a tv, that you could also view at home.

on this high capacity player, good turntables cost that much.

Re:40GB?

[plumby]

Personally, I've got somewhere in the region of 2,000 "legal, bought-and-paid-for" CDs. I've currently ripped just about 40GBs worth of MP3s from them, and when I get round to completing the process, I will comfortably have over the 60GB available on my Zen (and I haven't even started on my wife's CD collection).

Re:40GB?

[jimi the hippie]

ummmm... That would only be a 300% increase.

Re:40GB?

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously, I want my capacity, but not *that* much. The compressed version of my collection is about 85GB; until there's an iPod-or-smaller machine that big I'll just make do with my 60GB iPod.

There is something seriously wrong with you.

Re:40GB?

[kesuki]

the reason ATA needed boosting was because 40/mbs *4 = 160 mb/s and while back then they only had 33mb/sec thruput drives(at least for mainstream users).. well, you get the point. it's the TOTAL thruput that counts. not just one single drive, and areal densites (the driving factor for 'speed boosts') is about to go up by leaps and bounds for the next XX years (however long the industry decides to 'milk' the fact that they can in fact 'increase' performance with higher density media etc)

what you don't seem to get is that hard drives haven't gone up in densinty in almost 5 years. and that's why 'performance' has been stagnat. the 'faster drives all the time' was due simply to running the head across the platter at the same speed as before, while Increasing the density.

if your rotate a disc with 10x the density of bits at the same RPM as modern discs, and move the head at the 'same' speed, thruput goes up by exactly 10 fold. unless you have some technical references to why they'd have to slow down the spin rate, or reduce the speed of the head, your point is not valid.

Re:40GB?

[juhaz]

Maxtor Atlas 15K II can sustain almost for 100MB/s outer zone transfers and drops down to 75MB/s for inner zones, so even the slowest parts of that disk sustain over 70MB/s. Granted, it's not (S)ATA drive, but you didn't say anything about that...

Want ketchup with that hat?

Re:40GB?

[Anonymous Coward]

You're forgetting that many of us don't use these devices for just music. Lots of that extra space can be used for transporting data between computers without having to use email or waste a blank CD.

Re:40GB?

[wgaryhas]

But SATA only has a single drive per channel, unless you have a sata controller that supports using a port multiplier and a port multiplier. (neither of which is common)

Re:40GB?

[kesuki]

well it wouldn't suprize me at all to find out that 'cheaper' sata controllers could only handle 150 MB/sec no matter how many channels they had. or even to check and find that that's actually the specification. i'm too lazy to check though, but there are cheap 100 megabit ethernet cards that can only do 100 megabits total, that means essentially if you're sending and recieving each is capped at ~45 mbit/sec. and also that even when you're 'jsut sending' sending you can never exceed 90 mbit because of packet overhead and verification packets coming back across the layer.

Re:40GB?

[Sir.Grok]

Well, my Neuros shows up as a hard drive mp3 player. With that in mind, i can bring 50 or so gigs of data from location x to location y. This is handy when you have lots of divx that your friends want to get their hands on.

article text

[Anonymous Coward]

The MK4007GAL HDD 1.8-inch HDD packs 40GB on a single platter - the largest single-platter capacity yet achieved in the 1.8-inch form factor. This breakthrough technology sets new benchmarks for data density with the highest areal density currently on the market at 206 megabits per square millimeter (133 gigabits per square inch). The 1.8-inch PMR HDD is now shipping in Toshiba's new Gigabeat F41, enabling the MP3 player to store up to 10,000 songs.

"Toshiba has started an exciting new frontier for the HDD industry by leading the race to achieve this revolutionary technology, which has been the industry's aim for more than 20 years," said Scott Maccabe, vice president, Toshiba Storage Device Division. "PMR opens the door to products we haven't even begun to imagine, by removing the technical barriers inherent to packing more data on an HDD. Providing greater storage capacity on mobile disk drives allows Toshiba to give system OEMs the tools they need for next-generation digital information and entertainment devices."

Toshiba recently announced acquisition of a design center in Fremont, Calif., to help U.S.-based engineers and OEMs create new products using platforms such as PMR to span beyond the limits of today's conventional digital products. The 1.8-inch HDD form factor has been a critical component for consumer electronics products from MP3 players to handheld GPS systems and ultra-portable PCs. To date, Toshiba has shipped more than 14 million 1.8-inch HDDs since its introduction in mid-2000. The addition of PMR technology will increase capacity options for product designs beyond those currently on the market today, especially as Toshiba introduces an 80GB 1.8-inch HDD with PMR later this year.

PMR: The Technology Achievement
Toshiba is the first company in the storage industry to commercialize PMR, providing unsurpassed recording density and high operating reliability on its 1.8-inch HDD platform. The technology is based on a new magnetic disk structured to support perpendicular recording, a new high-performance perpendicular magnetic head, and disk and head integration technology that maximizes their combined performance.

Conventional longitudinal recording stores data on a magnetic disk as microscopic magnet bits aligned in plane. Although advances in magnetic coatings continue to improve data recording densities on HDD, when the densities become too extreme, the magnetic bits repulse each other due to in-plane alignment. Squeezing more bits on to a disk will eventually reach a point in which crowding degrades recorded bit quality. As such, HDD manufacturers face fast-approaching limits on storage capacities.

By standing the magnetic bits on end, perpendicular recording reinforces magnetic coupling between neighboring bits, achieving higher and more stable recording densities and improved storage capacity.

of course, you didn't hear?

[mnemonic_]

Yep, it's coming out 2007 May 05. As you know, we Slashdotters are privy to all manner of corporate secrets. Also, we can predict the future. I am sorry that you have not yet discovered these abilities. It is likely that your 800k uid inhibits them somewhat.

Re:of course, you didn't hear?

[TopSpin]

it's coming out 2007 May 05

To be announced May 07, 2007... May 6 is a Sunday, noob. :)

Re:of course, you didn't hear?

[weighn]

>> Yep, it's coming out 2007 May 05. As you know, we Slashdotters are privy to all manner of corporate secrets.

> To be announced May 07, 2007... May 6 is a Sunday, noob. :)

YES!! Cop that mnemonic_, you uber-asshole!
now go create an original account without having to add an underscore to a name that already exists, smart-ass.

Re:of course, you didn't hear?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, newcomer, us five digit UIDs know even more...

That's awesome.

[millennial]

I've been waiting patiently for this. However, I'd like to see them in standard sizes for IDE or SATA, not just for MP3 players... and what's with the whole "40GB is 10,000 songs" thing? What, are all songs recorded so that they'll be compressed to exactly 4MB now?
/joke?

Re:That's awesome.

[Anonymous Coward]

I've got 12,000 to 60 gb... so I guess they are not too far off...

Re:That's awesome.

[Anonymous Coward]

/joke?

No.

Re:That's awesome.

[ciroknight]

There's this thing, called an "average" or a "mean", depending where you went to middle school. What we do is add up a bunch of things, then divide by the number we added.

In this case, we add up the size of a bunch of songs, then divide by precisely the number of songs there are, and we get a number. That number is roughly around 4MB for a typical set of MP3s. So typical, in fact, I wrote a small C/perl program to computer the averages on all of my hard disks, and none of them were off in either direction more than a half a megabyte from 4MB (but then again, I have a vast music selection, and I'm an eclectic listener, YMMV).

Re:That's awesome.

[millennial]

Yeah... 3,000 songs isn't far off. Only 25% of what you have on there, right?

Re:That's awesome.

[millennial]

Congratulations on missing the "/joke?" line there.

Re:That's awesome.

[corsec67]

Well, if you don't like songs for a size unit, how about a Library of Congress, or a DVD rip?

Heh, what would be fun to see in a press release is the capacity expressed in porn. "This hard drive will store 500,000 images or 1,000 porn movies."

Re:That's awesome.

[AussieVamp2]

Yeah, 1.something MB a minute for your bog standard MP3 always seemed pretty reasonable to me (and looking at the ~40GB sample here, is (even with some at higher/lower bitrates.

Re:That's awesome.

[Anonymous Coward]

Let me summarise his reply, which you obviously took literally :

"Even though it is labelled as such, the previous post doesn't qualify as a joke, and to emphasise that, I'm actually going to answer it."

Re:That's awesome.

[bhima]

Screw the MP3 Players, I need one for my Canon 3050D DSLR!

Re:That's awesome.

[Anonymous Coward]

Collection of modern rock spanning 1963-2005 (encoding varries):

>$ cd /home/files/music/modern/
>$ find -name \*.mp3 | wc -l
6202
>$ du --max-depth 0 | cut -f1
33582912
>$ expr 33582912 / 6202
5414

Re:That's awesome.

[Anonymous Coward]

There's this thing, called an "average" or a "mean", depending where you went to middle school. What we do is add up a bunch of things, then divide by the number we added.

There's also this thing, called bitrate. Or is everybody still encoding 128kbps nowadays?

Re:That's awesome.

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, I'm sorry, but if none of your songs varied more than half a megabyte from 4MB, then you have neither a vast music collection, nor are you an eclectic listener. You are a pop music junkie. Nothing but "hip four minute diddies" for you (sorry for mis-quoting Blues Traveler).

Re:That's awesome.

[rnelsonee]

He's saying that all of his hard disk averages were 3.5-4.5 MB per song, not that every single song fit that range. So if he looked at his MP3s for C:, E: and F:, he just had 3 numbers to look at.

More *beats*

[Anonymous Coward]

It's all part of their plan to squeeze more bits onto the head of a pin.

That's more beats on the head of a pin.

Raid 5 for my laptop when?

[tacarat]

I'm thinking that laptop raid would be an excellent use for these. Maybe after some power and space tweaking, a single Raid 5 cartridge could be made in place of the normal hard drive. Since high performance laptops buyers don't seem to mind a little extra bulk/weight, a laptop made to accomodate such a setup might be well accepted by hardware lovers.

Re:Raid 5 for my laptop when?

[ipjohnson]

How about we bring higher density raid systems to the desktop first ;-)

Re:Raid 5 for my laptop when?

[Jeff DeMaagd]

Yeah, that'll work unless you want to actually use the laptop that doesn't require being plugged into the wall.

Re:Raid 5 for my laptop when?

[tacarat]

Do you mean something like this?

Re:Raid 5 for my laptop when?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you're trying to say that /.'ers are having trouble getting RAID. We already know how to get perpendicular (as many have already pointed out: there's a video that everyone should remember, because we all WFTV, right?). The real question is: will this new hard drive help us get RAID?

Oh wait. My bad. Excuse my Engrish. s/R/L/g. There. Now it makes more sense. :-)

Re:Raid 5 for my laptop when?

[Hao Wu]

A tape drive in a laptop.... Has that ever been done before?

Re:Raid 5 for my laptop when?

[adolf]

Raid 5? In a single unit? Forget the fact that it's in a laptop - the mere notion of a RAID array in a single device is, itself, absurd.

You get all of the disadvantages of extra mechanical complication, along with none of the advantages (speed[1], or otherwise) of RAID.

Count me out.

[1]: See, it sounds like a good theory. But you'll get more speed by just using a single, larger-diameter disc than you will by using several smaller-diameter discs. If RPM is constant, and diameter increases, then so does linear velocity, and thus data rates. Etc, so on, so forth. Unless you're going to be using lots of independant discs, it's not advantageous. Oh, and it's a laptop, which is presumably meant to run on batteries at least some of the time. It's almost always more efficient to run one motor, than it is to run several of them, along with several sets of controller electronics, and several sets of head actuators, and...

Re:Raid 5 for my laptop when?

[Jeff DeMaagd]

Actually, put one of those in a computer, and it would be more likely called a workstation or server than a desktop.

Re:Raid 5 for my laptop when?

[tacarat]

True, but considering it'd probably cost a lot, the people buying it would hopefully have read about the dismal battery life you're refering to. Dispite that, something with that kind of portablity and potential drive space would still have a fair amount of adopters. I'd use it for data recovery house calls and just plug into the client's wall (or charge them some odd surcharge for having to recharge my batteries). Anyone that would need to have a quickly scalable network deployed to a remote location in a short period of time could find a use for it. I'm thinking early response teams to a natural disaster could appreciate dragging a couple of laptops instead of the compact crate rack servers (don't remember how many pizza boxes they hold). I imagine they'd have a generator already on the 'things to pack' list.

Re:Raid 5 for my laptop when?

[tacarat]

Sorry I'm out of mod points :)

Assuming they made space for it, I don't see why they couldn't make it so all the drives were hot swappable (several drives with front access?). The single cart would be more to house the raid adaptor and the removable drives. I won't argue with performance gains, but the redundancy for the size would be the main selling point. Geeks wanting RAID 5 or 10 on a laptop would be secondary.

Re:Raid 5 for my laptop when?

[adolf]

Great, ok.

RAID in a laptop. For redundancy.

Now, class, everyone here should know that no sane form of RAID can withstand multiple-disc failure. Therefore, no sane person requires more than RAID 1 for redundancy purposes.

And RAID 1 is easy: Remove the CD-ROM from your laptop. Fab an adapter bracket and cable to connect a 2.5" hard drive. Insert into bay previously occupied by CD-ROM. Install requisite software drivers and configure the array appropriately.

Extra points if you find enough space to keep the CD-ROM internal. This might be facilitated by removing a floppy drive, or using fiberglass and resin to mold one or more protuding feet onto the bottom of the laptop within which are contained the componentry of the RAID array.

Re:Raid 5 for my laptop when?

[tacarat]

Cool. Never considered that as none of my laptops have ever lent themselves to having their cd drives removed. Time to go looking for those service manuals for my laptop.

Re:Raid 5 for my laptop when?

[Jeffrey Baker]

RAID 6 can survive multiple disk failures (two, exactly), as can RAID 1+0, RAID 1+5, and even RAID 1. All of these are "sane" and in fact widely used. RAID5 is the only level that can't survive multiple failures.

Re:Raid 5 for my laptop when?

[adolf]

Sane? Certainly not, in the context of Joe Slashdotter, and least of all with a laptop in the mix.

1+0 is a striped, mirrored array. It's not sane to make it multiple-failure-resistant, because it turns expensive in arrays of a size that Joe Slashdotter is likely to find useful, whereas RAID 5 would be more cost-effective.

1+5 is very seldom sane at all, even if it is reliable and fast.

1 is insane for more than a two-drive array, as Joe Slashdotter is obviously more inclined to use RAID 5 and enjoy the increase in available space availed by having 3 or more similar discs and parity redundancy instead of literal redundancy.

Thanks for playing, Jeff. Let me know when you come back to reality.

Re:Raid 5 for my laptop when?

[Trepalium]

I sure hope that RAID set up protects your data if your laptop gets stolen....

If it's important, you back it up. No exceptions. If you didn't back it up, and you lost it (because of theft, or malfunction), it mustn't have been important.

Re:Raid 5 for my laptop when?

[pointbeing]

[1]: See, it sounds like a good theory. But you'll get more speed by just using a single, larger-diameter disc than you will by using several smaller-diameter discs. If RPM is constant, and diameter increases, then so does linear velocity, and thus data rates. Etc, so on, so forth. Unless you're going to be using lots of independant discs, it's not advantageous. Oh, and it's a laptop, which is presumably meant to run on batteries at least some of the time. It's almost always more efficient to run one motor, than it is to run several of them, along with several sets of controller electronics, and several sets of head actuators, and...

[2] In desktop PCs where you're serving up lotsa little files it's been my experience that the aggregate seek times of a hardware RAID 5 array make the thing slower than a big single disk anyway.

Had an Adaptec 2100S hardware RAID 5 setup in my desktop PC - 32mb of cache, three 9g 10k rpm Western Digital drives. Pretty neat array at the time and *sustained* throughput was fast, fast, fast ;-)

Unfortunately my 40g 7200 RPM Deskstar could run circles around it doing almost all real-world tasks. I eventually sold the RAID array on eBay.

Also, sector density has at least as much to do with data transfer rates. A single 9g drive had two platters and even at 10k rpm couldn't match the transfer rate of the Deskstar.

Re:Raid 5 for my laptop when?

[ipjohnson]

All you did was link to current day raid cards. I don't see anything about using these nice new really small drives in a high density raid solution. So next time you want to be smart ass try and stay on target.

Re:Raid 5 for my laptop when?

[Rude Turnip]

They have RAID for laptops now. Check out the Sager models at Powernotebooks.com. Funny to note that although RAID is offered because the hardware supports it, they don't particularly recommend it.

Recording method not important

[davidwr]

99% of people don't care about the recording method. All they care about are things like price, size, performance, and other characteristics like noise, heat, etc.

Give me small, dense, long-lasting, zillions of read/write cycles, low heat/energy, fast, compatible with existing equipment or cheap adapter card, etc. etc. and I won't care if it's flat, perpendicular, or shaped like a three-dimensional pretzel, er, I mean a protien.

Re:Recording method not important

[slavemowgli]

99% of people also don't read Slashdot. This is News for Nerds, after all...

Re:Recording method not important

[Anonymous Coward]

99% of people don't care about the recording method

That is until they see the Hitachi song & dance number...

Re:Recording method not important

[Anonymous Coward]

Give me small, dense, long-lasting, zillions of read/write cycles, low heat/energy, fast, compatible with existing equipment or cheap adapter card, etc. etc.

Would you like a pony with that...?

perpendicular magnetic recording- Wikipedia

[Anonymous Coward]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpendicular_recordi ng

Re:perpendicular magnetic recording- Wikipedia

[fsterman]

Or even better, the flash animation.

Head of a Pin

[pipingguy]

Clever use of obscure religiousity there. A few quick searches show that this concept is relatively unknown.

Re:Head of a Pin

[slavemowgli]

That's not really obscure - a reference to the science fiction short story referencing this concept would've been. :) (If you don't know which one I'm talking about, it's Anne McCaffrey's "The Ship Who Sang".)

Re:Head of a Pin

[TapeCutter]

I suppose 11,000+ hits on google could be considered obscure by some.

My favorite answer is "Seraphim or cherubim?".

Re:Head of a Pin

[Anonymous Coward]

...if you're illiterate.

Re:Head of a Pin

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sorry, but you're a moron. Head of a pin is a common term for the HEAD of a PIN. There's nothing clever, obscure, or religious about it, and way to make up a word. A few quick searches makes one wonder how you got modded up at all. Is THIS the kind of crap we have to look forward to on slashcrap now?

Re:Head of a Pin

[Anonymous Coward]

No, he's referring to the question "How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?". Which is associated with medieval theology of the Scholastic school, the best-known representative being Saint Thomas Aquinas, the 13th-century Christian philosopher and a Dominican monk.

Re:Head of a Pin

[roguenine19]

It was a common point of contention among medieval thinkers: how many angels could dance on the head of a pin? Since then it has become a phrase used to describe a pedantic philosophical question.

What I want to know...

[Mr. Flibble]

What I want to know is can these drives walk around and sing and dance to a tune very much like the "I'm a bill" - and then, does this drive become a law when it is done?

Re:What I want to know...

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course. Don't tell me you have already forgotten this.

You're in the wrong place.

[brakk]

I think you took a wrong turn at Albuquerque.

Re:Is 40GB the smallest you c... (mods on crack!)

[forkazoo]

Uhhh... This isn't insightful. It's a non-sequiter. Granted, the grand-parent poster was off topic, since he wasn't talking about the current drive, just the next generation of hard drives in general. But, come on, if you actually read the grandparent post, it didn't say anything inconsistent with the summary.

What size are the iPod Mini HDDs?

[NickCatal]

And doesn't Toshiba provide them? Or was it Hitachi?

Re:What size are the iPod Mini HDDs?

[Anonymous Coward]

Full-size iPods use 1.8" drives. The iPod mini uses (I think) the 0.85" ones.

What I want is a 20GB iPod mini (royal/dark blue) and a 250GB drive for my 12" PowerBook!

Perpendicular Magnetic Recording Bible

[adamdewolf]

If you really want to know more about this tech,
I found this book earlier in the year.
It's pretty much the Bible for perpendicular magnetic.

Gets really in-depth.

Perpendicular Magnetic Recording
by Sakhrat Khizroev, Dmitri Litvinov

"This book is intended for graduate students, young engineers and even senior and more experienced researchers in this field who need to acquire adequate knowledge of the physics of perpendicular magnetic recording in order to further develop the field of perpendicular recording."

Re:Perpendicular Magnetic Recording Bible

[uberchicken]

Dang, he's not kidding. That book really exists. I was totally expecting a clever goat sex link. I'm not sure which is worse.

Re:Perpendicular Magnetic Recording Bible

[Anonymous Coward]

Clean Amazon link: Perpendicular Magnetic Recording (Hardcover)

HDs with two sets of heads?

[Michael Woodhams]

A thought I've had in the past, which I was reminded of looking at the low RPM of this drive:

Why not make drives with two sets of heads, 180 degrees apart on the platters? This could double access rates, and seems like it should be fairly cheap. Even if it weren't cheap, some people are prepared pay over twice as much for a 10K rpm rather than 7.2K rpm drive today.

This seems way too obvious not to have been thought of - so what is the flaw in my reasoning?

Re:HDs with two sets of heads?

[Anonymous Coward]

full-duplex!

Re:HDs with two sets of heads?

[Detritus]

It's been done in the past, and it isn't cost-effective. You need two positioners, two head assemblies, two read channel amps, two servo channels, and a faster and more complex controller. There are cheaper ways to improve speed.

Re:HDs with two sets of heads?

[jcr]

This seems way too obvious not to have been thought of - so what is the flaw in my reasoning?

Basically, it's cheaper to stripe your data over multiple drives or have massive RAM caches than to build special-purpose drives.

I remember one drive from about ten years ago that was built for video instant replay use, which actually accessed both sides of nine platters in parallel. Cool idea, but it didn't take more than a year or two before ordinary drives could match the data rate.

-jcr

Re:HDs with two sets of heads?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's cheaper and faster to just use two whole drives in a RAID array.

Re:HDs with two sets of heads?

[ptbarnett]

Many years ago, I worked on a drive that used four heads in parallel, on a multi platter drive. There was only a single servo, and all the heads were already there. It was just a matter of multiplexing the data and streaming it out the I/O channel.

I don't think I've seen anything like it since then, at least not in the consumer market. I'm not sure why it wouldn't be possible to multiplex the data from every head into the drive cache simultaneously. I'm sure it would require more electronics, but what would be the incremental cost?

Re:HDs with two sets of heads?

[corsec67]

Basically, it's cheaper to stripe your data over multiple drives or have massive RAM caches than to build special-purpose drives.

All that in a 1.8" single drive form factor?

If you are using a 1.8" drive, you already have stated that you care about space. Unless Micro-ATX motherboards and cases use those small drives, raid and a multi-head 1.8" drive seem to be going in opposite directions to get faster.

Re:HDs with two sets of heads?

[Michael Woodhams]

If there are cheaper ways, why is there a market for 10K rpm drives? The cheapest local price I can find for a 74Gb Raptor (10K) is NZ$316, compared to $82-$110 for standard size 80Gb 7.2K drives, i.e. a 3-4 times price premium. If it cost twice as much to manufacture (everything duplicated except platters and spindle motor) I could still get 14.4K rpm performance for 2/3 the price of a Raptor.

Re:HDs with two sets of heads?

[AndreiK]

I would think that actually getting a two-headed hard drive would be possible, but coordinating the different heads would require two controllers anyway. I assume a platter is cheaper than a controller, so that's why this hasnt been done.

Re:HDs with two sets of heads?

[Detritus]

Modern recording densities require an independent positioner and servo channel for every active head.

Re:HDs with two sets of heads?

[Detritus]

Seagate used to make them (Sabre 5 2HP, Barracuda 2 2HP). They were high-end drives and very expensive. The technology wasn't cost-effective.

Anybody who is really serious about performance is going to start with 15K rpm SCSI drives, not low-end IDE junk.

Re:HDs with two sets of heads?

[ptbarnett]

Modern recording densities require an independent positioner and servo channel for every active head.

So there's a separate positioner for every head in a multi-platter ATA drive? Or does it just switch to a different head for servo information every time it switches to a different platter?

Re:HDs with two sets of heads?

[ptbarnett]

I found the answer here:

http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/op/act_Servo.htm

The dedicated servo track that would make it possible to read multiple tracks at a time is obsolete, as this method is sensitive to temperature variations between the platters.

The embedded servo track is used by all modern drives, which intersperses the servo information with the data.

For clarification, I should note that I worked on the OS driver for a 4-head parallel drive, rather than the actual disk -- which explains my ignorance about the details of the drive technology.

Re:HDs with two sets of heads?

[Detritus]

There is just one positioner for all of the heads. Only one head is active at any given time. The servo information is embedded in the data surface, so a single head can be used to read both data and servo information. Every time you switch heads, the drive has to reacquire servo lock on the new surface.

Re:HDs with two sets of heads?

[ksheff]

It looks like Conner Peripheral's Chinook line of hard drives did that.

Re:HDs with two sets of heads?

[Fweeky]

10/15kRPM drives aren't just consumer level drives with faster motors; they use physically smaller platters and lower areal densities and higher quality components to reduce seek times and increase reliability. If you take a cheapo 80G platter consumer drive and throw another head assembly on it, you're going to make it even less reliable because of the higher component count, and probably still get beaten in real world performance because while your seek times are on the order of 10-20ms, a good 15kRPM drive can get more like 3ms.

By the time you've switched to higher quality components and testing to make the whole thing worthwhile, and absorbed even more extra costs because you've got such a small target market and lower economies of scale, you'll probably find it makes more sense for said market just to buy more drives to get their multiple independent heads.

Re:HDs with two sets of heads?

[Cobblepop]

http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/op/actMultiple-c.ht ml

In fact, such hard disks have been built. Conner Peripherals, which was an innovator in the hard disk field in the late 1980s and early 1990s (they later went bankrupt and their product line and technology were purchased by Seagate) had a drive model called the Chinook that had two complete head-actuator assemblies: two sets of heads, sliders and arms and two actuators. They also duplicated the control circuitry to allow them to run independently. For its time, this drive was a great performer. But the drive never gained wide acceptance, and the design was dropped. Nobody to my knowledge has tried to repeat the experiment in the last several years.

Re:HDs with two sets of heads?

[jcr]

And you've also chosen space over speed.

-jcr

Re:HDs with two sets of heads?

[Junior J. Junior III]

Mechanical complexity. You're basically doubling the opportunity for a head crash. I don't know that there's a whole lot of space inside for additional heads, either. It's still not a bad idea, and one that they ought to do some R&D on.

Re:HDs with two sets of heads?

[Rick.C]

This has been done in the past, perhaps the IBM 3380 (early 1980s) was the first, perhaps not.

The question you have to ask is: how will the two acctuators work together? Option #1 is to have head-1 cover the outer tracks and head-2 cover the inner tracks. This leads to improved seek times (average seek time is halved, but track-to-track seek is unchanged), but does not improve rotational delay.

Option #2 would be to have each head cover all the tracks, cutting the rotational delay is half, but leaving average seek times unchanged. This would also require that both heads be able to track each other's data. They would have to be aligned very precisely to each other.

IIRC, the IBM 3380 used option #1.

Re:1.8-inch form factor

[cnerd2025]

Lots of Americans would like to change (including Ich), but most are just used to the old system. BTW, we have to learn the conversion factor: 2.54 cm per inch (.3937 inches per cm). Just get used to it. We have to. And adding with odd bases (i.e. 12, 16ths) is kind of hard, compared to the metric system.

Lossless!

[tepples]

And every byte [of the 120 MB hard drive in a music player] is in legal, bought-and-paid-for music, right?

"Legal"? Remember that a CD in FLAC or Apple Lossless format is about 0.3 GB. It's not unheard of for somebody who's been collecting CDs since 1985 to own 400 CDs, especially if the collector has been hitting the pawn shops, garage sales, thrift stores, and half.com. Do the math. And as for "bought-and-paid-for", you're referring to the legislators who work on copyright law, right?

Re:Lossless!

[AussieVamp2]

Good point, big enough drive you could put the 1000 albums of whatever of MP3s in a nicer format. At 500 MB an album, fills up pretty fast!

Re:Lossless!

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not unheard of for somebody who's been collecting CDs since 1985 to own 400 CDs

I find it hard to believe that anyone who has been collecting CDs since 1985 would own only 400. I started in 1984 and stopped counting at about 3000.

Re:Lossless!

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed... Started collecting last year. ~200 REAL CDs.

Re:Lossless!

[tepples]

I find it hard to believe that anyone who has been collecting CDs since 1985 would own only 400.

It was a lower bound, of course :-) The point was to refute goldspider's implication that filling a 120 GB hard drive with recordings would seem to require copyright infringement.

Re:Lossless!

[TheRaven64]

And if you are buying some form of DVD audio (and have worked out some way of ripping it) then 24-bit 96KHz audio in up to 6 channels then it can get really big - although presumably there is a lot more redundant information so things like FLAC will do better.

5mm high

[TummyX]

What's important is that these drives are single platter 1.8" drives. 40GB and 60GB 1.8" drives have been around for a while but they're double platter and are about 9mm high.

These drives would be great upgrades to tablets like the NEC Litepad.

Re:5mm high

[JediLow]

Actually I'm pretty excited about these new hard drives comming out. Double platter HDs won't fit in my mp3 player (ihp 120) and these new single platter ones are small enough that they can - which means I'll be able to upgrade the size of my player while retaining all the functionality of it (and being able to use rockbox).

Re:can't wait for the 1TB 3.5 inch version to arri

[matt21811]

It is posible to make an educated guess on this.

The density of transistors has been doubling about every 18 months since 1997, in the storage industry, density has been doubling every 12 months.

So,
8/05 - 400 GB - which is close to the largest 3.5" drives you can get at the moment
8/06 - 800 GB
8/07 - 1600 GB

So you could, quite reasonably, estmate that 1 TB 3.5" drives will be around early 2007.

Re:1.8-inch form factor

[jim_deane]

SI units? You want us to use SI units?

But we were just getting warmed up to Metric!

Sprint Commercial.

[Anonymous Coward]

"It's all part of their plan to squeeze more bits onto the head of a pin."

It's so quiet, you can hear your data drop.

Re:Sprint Commercial.

[Azadre]

And if you don't hear it, please back up your data immediately. It may be too late. :)

I need two 1.8" drives-I can't find them-HELP!

[Anonymous Coward]

I need

1) a 30 GB 1.8", 7 mm height Hitachi with a 44 pin ATA interface

2) a 60 GB 1.8" Toshiba drive (the one from the 60GB iPod)

I have searched all over the Internet, nobody has them in stock. A few places list them as 'backordered' and accept orders but they have not delivered yet, I've been waiting for over 4 months.

There are lots of places with 1.8" Hitachi drives, but not the one I want, there are only 20GB 7mm drives, no 7mm 30GB; higher capacities (40GB, 60GB) are also available, but they are 9.5 mm.

No online store I am aware of has 1.8" 60GB Toshiba drives in stock (there are 20,30 and 40GB). I could buy a 60GB iPod and extract the drive from it, but this solution is too expensive. The Toshiba and Hitachi 1.8" drives have different interfaces and thus I cannot use a Toshiba drive instead of a Hitachi drive and vice versa.

I would appreciate if you could help me.

Re:can't wait for the 1TB 3.5 inch version to arri

[Anonymous Coward]

Hiatachi has 500 GB 3.5 inch SATA drives out right now.

Re:1.8-inch form factor

[kf6auf]

Adding might be kinda weird, but dividing is actually much easier in base-12 than in base-10. For example, base-12 can be easily divided into 2,3,4, and 6 while base-10 can only be divided into 2 and 5. Now, if only we could all grow another finger and then revise our number system and have a superior metric system.

But in the meantime, I will be using cgs/mks/etc for work (Physics) and English for driving, cooking, and so on. Before I start using some form of metric for everyday activities, companies need to sell goods with metric measurements. Until that happens it's not going to change.

only drive that failed

[catmistake]

In 20 years, the only hard drive that I've ever seen fail before it was replaced was manufactuered by Toshiba, and it was only 8 months past its 1 year warranty. It was a 40 GB laptop drive.

Re:only drive that failed

[totoanihilation]

Off topic, but all the laptop drives I've seen fail (3 to date, on a sampling of about 12 laptops, owned personally or by close family) were IBM TravelStars. Thank god they sold their HD business because frankly they were terrible at it...

Re:only drive that failed

[Zen Punk]

BUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUULLLLLLshit. I'm barely 20 years old and I don't have enough appendages to count the number of HD's I've gone through personally, not to mention the ones I've seen fail in other people's computers.

Re:only drive that failed

[Anonymous Coward]

You must have really piss poor luck or don't know shit about a hard drives requirements for installation, use, etc.

Re:only drive that failed

[Zen Punk]

No, I use old equipment. HD's have a limited lifespan. Do you seriously believe you could use computers for 20 years and see only one hard drive fail?

Re:only drive that failed

[ltbarcly]

I'm a sysadmin. I have about 2000 HD's going. They fail at a rate of about 1 every week and a half. They also fail in groups of 2 or 3 (possibly temperature driven?). IDE HD's fail much more often than FC, although I have many more (3-4x as many) FC disks than IDE. Whenever the temperature jumps the IDE drives start going haywire.

Re:only drive that failed

[Anonymous Coward]

How many times has your limp dick failed on you?

Re:only drive that failed

[Anonymous Coward]

You're absolutly 100% correct that the failures are often temperature related. Story:

I used to build/service some multi-drived video servers, with the 2nd and 3rd HD's mounted in removeable drive sleds. I began to notice a temperature difference between "good" drives and "bad" drives when I would swap them in a system. This temperature difference was noticeable with your bare hands.

Out of curiosity, I started to occasionally take temp. readings with an infrared thermometer I had (often referred to as a "thermal gun") of the type used by, say, a nascar pit crew on racing tires. (similar to one of these: http://www.infrared-usa.com/Product.aspx?ProductID =10115 ).

I began to notice an anectdotal correlation between drive failures and the temperature readings.
As an experiment and as part of the quality-assurance process, I began to remove the operating drives from the server case, and log a temperature reading on specific areas of the underside of the drive and then replace it.

  Note that we were using a specific "family" of either 60 or 80GB 3.5" IDE Maxtor drives, which all used the same chassis. It's also important to use a consistent part of the drive chassis for your measurements.

Whoa and behold, there was a direct statistical correlation between drive temp. and failures, regardless of ambient temperature. Apparently, if a drive had failed, or was in the process of failing (continual, intermittent bad read/writes) as long as the drive mechanicals actually still operated, there was a correlation to temperature over 90% of the time. If I recall correctly, drives operated fine with a reading of 92 degrees F, but got flaky at >95 degrees. I may be off on the exact temps, but I do recall the difference between good/bad to be as little as ~3 degrees F. Note that these temperatures were logged daily, over the course of several weeks. One could probably take this further, using the S.M.A.R.T. freatures of the drive to read actual read/write stats from the drive itself.

This phenomenon is indeed very real. Your probably right in that IDE drives fail far more often than their FibreChannel counterparts. Our drives were your standard consumer-grade IDE drives, which are not built to the specifications of good FC or SCSI drives. We were operating these drives 24/7 (not just spinning platters, but actually pulling data off them) and they were being pushed much harder than they would be had they been used in a typical consumer desktop system.

Any questions, get me at: alaskapete AT gmail DOT com

Crest of a new wave.

[Ricardo]

Maybe this is overly navel gazing the whole thing but;

This will be a watershed event. In about 5 years you will be looking back saying "remember before Hitachi did that thing, and most all HDDs were less than 500GB, and people were walking around with 4GB HDDs in their portable MP3 players".

Its not often you can stand back say "right here where I'm standing, is the big bump in the curve"

and its happening now!!

Re:Crest of a new wave.

[Anonymous Coward]

no it's not just an other evolution not a revolution
more important thing in hdd technology have happend in the last 2 years.

the non sequential reading and something about sata
i guess onboard controler

Re:1.8-inch form factor

[SPY_jmr1]

They have.
A lot.

They sound alot like you!

Enough repititions of anything, and you can tune it out. It's kinda like how you don't notice what the inside of your shoe feels like.

And for number twoooo...

Yes. Next question? ;)

Re:Informative Video!!!!

[UpLateDrinkingCoffee]

"great flash video" totally undersells it.. this is easily the most entertaining thing I've seen from a technology company. If you grew up in the 80's watching Schoohouse Rock, you will totally love it. Check it out.

Its easier and cheaper to increase platters?

[spitzak]

My guess: most of the time only one thing is being read from the disk at a time (yes several files can be open and reading, but I would suspect that only one being read right at a moment is very common). Therefore it seems the best use of two heads is to have them read 1/2 of the same track. This means that the duplicate positioning machinery is being used to place the heads at exactly the same track. If instead you added another platter or platter side, you could reuse the positioning machinery and get the exact same speed increase for transfers. Adding more platters also doubles the capacity, so this is a big win over multiple heads.

Of course 2 heads halves the rotational delay to aquire a piece of data. So it does have some wins. But maybe not enough.

Re:Its easier and cheaper to increase platters?

[Detritus]

No matter how you configure the heads, you need an independent positioner and servo channel for every active head. Think of it as a microscopic game of Pole Position. Each platter surface is a unique racetrack, and each head needs its own driver.

Re:1.8-inch form factor

[TwoScoopsOfPig]

Son, I don't know how to tell you this... SI is metric. It means "Systeme Internationale" which is French for "Zee metric seesteem! Oho!" </outrageous accent>

Re:1.8-inch form factor

[rdwulfe]

I've got to chip in my 2 (american) cents worth. Have you looked at a potato chip package recently? Or any food product? They all have metric measurements on them. However, if you mean cook books with metric measurements, you might be up a creek. ;) Unless you purchase a British cook book... Then who knows how the food'll taste? I'm so gonna get it for that.

Re:1.8-inch form factor

[IchBinEinPenguin]

But in the meantime, I will be using cgs/mks/etc for work (Physics) and English for driving, cooking, and so on. Before I start using some form of metric for everyday activities, companies need to sell goods with metric measurements. Until that happens it's not going to change.

That's kind of my point.... why not drive the conversion from imperial to metric from the high-tech end rather than (or as well as) the kitchen-sink end?

Big Blue Shift

[Doc Ruby]

How come Toshiba and Hitachi can make profits on the HD biz, but IBM couldn't?

Re:Big Blue Shift

[KlaymenDK]

Yeah ... frankly, I'm a bit amazed that IBM didn't come up with this first. But kudos to Toshiba, they do make good hw.

Re:Big Blue Shift

[Anonymous Writer]

frankly, I'm a bit amazed that IBM didn't come up with this first.

Wasn't IBM coming up with prototypes for things like holographic memory years ago? I could have sworn I read that somewhere.

One cubic inch of such storage would be able to hold 8,083,729,105 terabytes. In practice, the data density would be much lower...

Re:Animation of How It Works

[fsterman]

Dammit, now I have that song stuck in my head.

dumb questions

[weighn]

instead of making the bits perpendicular, why can't they just make them shorter and achieve the same thing? Consider the dash, which can represent a horizontal bit on a platter, - , one end is north, the other is south. What causes the lower limit for the length of the bit as it releates to the drive head reading its orientation?

Re:dumb questions

[wunch]

It's called the Superparamagnetic effect. If you make the grain size (the region of magnetic orientation that would define one bit) too small, it will spontaneously randomize due to thermodynamics.

just a guess

[ksheff]

I don't know if IBM was losing money or not, but maybe they decided that the return on capital on the disk drive business didn't meet some internal standard. So they sold it (and later the PC business) in order to put the capital to work on more profitable segments of their business?

Re:just a guess

[Doc Ruby]

Well, that's a safe guess, unless IBM is no longer operating on the basic principles of capitalism. The real question remains: is IBM's Global Services division growing faster than Hitachi's HD biz? And can GS continue to grow like that, without the strategic assets of a leading HD/PC brand?

Re:just a guess

[ksheff]

I don't see why not. Given the problems that many have had with IBM's hard drives and low end servers/desktops, it's probably a monkey off their back.

"Inspire the Next"

[Sinner]

Wow, are Hitachi actually using that Engrish slogan outside of Japan? I'd assumed their overseas divisions would be too embarrassed to touch it.

For those who haven't had the pleasure to spend time in this wonderful but infuriating country, saying "the next" without specifying the next what is a common mistake in Japanese English (presumably because the Japanese equivalent, tsugi, is a noun, not an adjective).

Hopefully this will be the start of a fabulous new trend of Japanese companies exporting their Engrish slogans! Watch out for Sony's brain-melting "Invitation to Next" slogan, coming to a billboard near you!

Re:"Inspire the Next"

[lxs]

Yup, it's badly formed English. So bad in fact that it has your brain racing, thinking "inspire the next WHAT???" So bad that you can't think of anything else. So bad that you have to post about in on an online forum.

It is a basic trick of Ericksonian hypnosis.
Whether this case is just a lucky coincidence or a planned strategy doesn't matter anymore (although many copywriters are enamoured with neuroliguistic programming techniques). You and me and everyone else has "Hitachi: Inspire the next" burned in our brains. (On the bright side, it does stop that 'get perpendicular' song looping in your head.)

Welcome to the wonderful world of advertising.

Re:"Inspire the Next"

[Neticulous]

Dick... and I wanted to visit japan!

Re:1.8-inch form factor

[CreateWindowEx]

I presume the OP was aware of this and just making a joke, but for pedantry, just noting that SI uses a specific subset of the more general metric system, namely meters, kilograms, and all other units that are derived from those or seconds such as newtons (kg m/s^2) or joules. There are other non-SI systems that use metric, such as CGS (centimeter-gram-second), with derived units such as dynes and ergs. Then of course there is the inch-pinch-jiffy system of which we do not speak.

But thanks to the fscking Brits who dumped their crappy system on us hapless Americans, I can only really think in things like foot-pounds and pounds-per-inch spring rates, and end up having to use abominations such as slugs for mass.

Well obviously

[deaddrunk]

You need all that HD space for FreeBSD, Linux, Windows and Solaris partitions.

Re:Well obviously

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh, who needs a Windows partition? It's much better to hide Windows inside a virtual environment, like VMWare or SunPCi.

An added bonus: virtual drives can be compressed when not in use.

I just can't bring myself to give Redmond the benefit of a proper partition. Shove 'em into a file inside UFS, that's much better.

Re:1.8-inch form factor

[arkhan_jg]

But thanks to the fscking Brits who dumped their crappy system on us hapless Americans, I can only really think in things like foot-pounds and pounds-per-inch spring rates, and end up having to use abominations such as slugs for mass.

Aha, it was all part of our dastardly plan to destroy your economy when we switched to metric, leaving you with an outdated and illogical system!
Bwahahaha. Shame it didn't work, but you seem to have found your own method with republican presidents ;)

Uhm...

[mark-t]

Am I missing something here, or does storing bits perpendicularly also mean that one can no longer store different data on opposite sides of the same platter?

"Factor of 10" capacity improvement, Hitachi claims? Seems to me that it should only be a factor of 5, since you are losing one side of each platter in the bargain, afaics.

Re:Uhm...

[fendragon]

If you looked at the "Get Perpendicular" flash movie linked somewhere above, you'd see that the poles of the magnetic head make a U-shaped field in the magnetic media. The trailing edge of the U is the part that's left on the disk. So the recording method doesn't need access to both sides of the platter and it should still be possible to record separately on both sides. HOW they do that remains a mystery (to me)

so below, why not above?

[mlush]

Were seeing small and smaller form factors. Why are we not seeing 5.25" form factor being used to build terabyted rives?

2.88 Floppy Diskettes

[atcurtis]

Correct me if I am wrong....

but didn't the short-lived 2.88Mb 3.5" floppies use perpendicular recording?

(For those too young to remember, in the 1990s, IBM shipped many of their PS/2 machines with 2.88 floppy drives - unfortunately the media was too expensive, more expensive than 2 standard "High Density" 1.44 diskettes - the drives were very expensive, the heads had to support the perpendicular recording mode as well as standard - also IIRC standard controllers and BIOS couldn't support the higher capacity drives. IBM even tried to boost awareness of the newer format by imprinting a tiny "2.88" on to the blue eject buttons)

Re:2.88 Floppy Diskettes

[StikyPad]

Yep.. and guess who created the 2.88 floppy?

None other than Toshiba.

I'm not sure about the BIOS, but you're correct regarding the controller. PCGuide says the 500Kbit limitation of existing floppy controllers was insufficient; the 2.88 floppies required a 1Mbit transfer rate. I'm not sure why the drives couldn't be slowed down for the sake of compatibility though. Seems easy enough to throw a jumper on there to toggle 500Kbit/1Mbit transfer rates, but I'm no EE.

OK I love schoolhouse rock too, but

[commodoresloat]

that was easily one of the dumbest things I've ever seen. I want that 2 minutes and fifty-seven seconds of my life back.

OK, never mind, you're right, I would just use them clicking the next lame link I see on this page.

We are using different units

[commodoresloat]

The article tells you how many "songs" it holds.

Rio Karma upgrade?

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder if it would be possible to stick one of these into a Rio Karma, to give us the 40GB that we were originally promised ?

Regards, Toon.

Drive Time

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd suggest Q1 2006 or before.

It's basically going to be as the market demands.

Re:so below, why not above?

[mlush]

Were seeing small and smaller form factors. Why are we not seeing 5.25" form factor being used to build terabyted rives?

OK I did my homework

Re:Informative Video!!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Schoolhouse Rock was on during the 70s. They might've been showing reruns in the 80s, but I don't remember seeing them then...

something i dont get..

[thegoogler]

ok, they can cram a ton of data on a tiny platter, now why not go back to 5 1/2 desktop drives? if they made full height 5 1/2 drives, they could fit arround 2.8tb in one drive. how is this a bad idea?

Re:something i dont get..

[paz5]

Here is the response to the same question asked elsewhere. I had always wondered my self. I personally would love to have a 1Tb disk now (despite the argument that drives double every year anyway).
direct link to reason

Follow-up question

[Satorian]

It's all part of their plan to squeeze more bits onto the head of a pin.

I wonder, do more angels fit onto the head of a pin if arranged perpendicularly?

Re:Follow-up question

[planetfinder]

Since I'm pretty sure that angles don't need sleep or have sex its my guess that the original estimates assumed that they were vertical.

Re:Follow-up question

[Rick.C]

Since I'm pretty sure that angles don't need sleep or have sex its my guess that the original estimates assumed that they were vertical.

Oh come on!

You get that many angels packed onto the head of a pin, and you just know there's some hanky-panky going on.

Re:Follow-up question

[Anonymous Coward]

jesus weeps for you.

(god chuckled a little, knowingly)

Re:can't wait for the 1TB 3.5 inch version to arri

[Xorkid]

yes, assuming that 3.5" drives stick with the current "parallel" recording.

the whole point of TFA is drives moving to a perpendicular recording mech is to increase desity, some say by ten times.

I'm not a hard drive engineer but one would assume that this tech would increase the amount stored on a drive and distort you timeline slightly.

Blade servers, yes

[mparaz]

I got a Toshiba laptop hard drive replaced. The replacement I got came from a Sun blade server - OEMd to Toshiba. I'm sure blade chassis could make good use of denser 1.8" and 2.5" drives.

Re:1.8-inch form factor

[Anonymous Coward]

Most British recipes involving flour won't work in America because American flour is over-processed.

Re:1.8-inch form factor

[TwoScoopsOfPig]

Ah. I stand corrected. I shall commence the Hanging of the Head in Shame.

Re:dumb answer

[Rick.C]

Consider the dash, which can represent a horizontal bit on a platter, - , one end is north, the other is south.

You can't use a dash because both ends of a dash are the same. You have to use an arrow ->, which can be flipped for the zeros and ones.

As you decrease the bit-width, the - gets squeazed into the > until it pokes through, giving you a >- which is a protocol violation.

:)

Re:can't wait for the 1TB 3.5 inch version to arri

[SQL Error]

The density of transistors has been doubling about every 18 months since 1997, in the storage industry, density has been doubling every 12 months.

This was true between about 1998 and 2002. Then it ran into a wall. (Before 1998, the doubling time for disks was the same as for transistors.)

250GB three-platter drives appeared in early '02 - albeit at 5400 rpm. Three years later, we are up to 400GB, with 500GB due soon. That's a doubling time of more than three years.

Re:can't wait for the 1TB 3.5 inch version to arri

[matt21811]

Yes, I'm assuming that this technology is what will allow hard disks to continue their Moore's law like increases. I see this technology as continuing the trend not changing it.

Your sig

[Anonymous Coward]

Obviously God is an American!

What other nationality could make such a huge motherfuckin' fuck-up of everything.

HTC426030G7AT00-I also need it.Where we can find i

[Anonymous Coward]

I think that the hitachi drive you need is HTC426030G7AT00 (30GB 1.8", 7 mm height). I also want one, where we can buy it?

Camp Perpendicular!!

[mattshadbolt]

Hello all

Found this little animations about perpendicular hard drives quite funny(although a little disturbing!).

Slashdot wouldnt submit my story but hopefully you guys will see it!

http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/research/recording_h ead/pr/PerpendicularAnimation.html

- matty

Re:Camp Perpendicular!!

[mcsynk]

Thanks. I wouldn't have understood perpendicular bits if it wasn't for that fine animation. An interesting lesson in the power of music and song too. thanks again for a good giggle! Pete

When will 4 of these be in a 3.5" enclosure

[Anonymous Coward]

Wouldn't it be great to see 4 of these in a 3.5" enclosure. They could be configured as a RAID 0+1 totalling 80GB and have the additional security of redundancy. Increased speed and data security in one package... way sweet.

Re:1.8-inch form factor

[TeknoHog]

Adding might be kinda weird, but dividing is actually much easier in base-12 than in base-10. For example, base-12 can be easily divided into 2,3,4, and 6 while base-10 can only be divided into 2 and 5. Now, if only we could all grow another finger and then revise our number system and have a superior metric system.

That's just the problem with Imperial units, the ratio between successive units is different from the base of the number system. Besides, the Imperial ratio is sometimes 12, sometimes 8 (pints to gallon), sometimes 3 (feet to yards), etc. which adds to the confusion. Metric is great for two reasons: for having a self-consistent ratio, and for that ratio being the same as our number base.

You are not correct.

[Anonymous Coward]

There are only two 1.8" HD manufacturers, Toshiba and Hitachi, and they use incompatible connectors. The Toshiba looks like a shrunken 2.5" drive, while Hitachi uses the same connector from the 2.5" drive mounted on the side of the drive. The IBM X40 uses the Hitachi connector, while Dell uses the Toshiba in the Lattitude X1. I think most ultraportable laptops with 1.8" drives use the Toshiba connector

This is a worthless comment. Why? Because EVERY laptop manufacturer makes their OWN CUSTOM connector from mobo to drive. You will need that connector for that computer! So it doesn't fucking matter which one you get, you still need a special connector. Additionally, if you ask (which you obviously haven't) you can get either connector from any manufacturer. Try it. You want the Hitachi connector for a machine that had a Toshiba, call them the fuck up and ask, stop complaining. Nearly ALL manufacturers who use 1.8" drives supply from BOTH sources. It would be incredibly stupid to source only one maker. Duh.

Re:You are not correct.

[adam1101]

This is a worthless comment. Why? Because EVERY laptop manufacturer makes their OWN CUSTOM connector from mobo to drive. You will need that connector for that computer! So it doesn't fucking matter which one you get, you still need a special connector. Additionally, if you ask (which you obviously haven't) you can get either connector from any manufacturer. Try it. You want the Hitachi connector for a machine that had a Toshiba, call them the fuck up and ask, stop complaining. Nearly ALL manufacturers who use 1.8" drives supply from BOTH sources. It would be incredibly stupid to source only one maker. Duh.

Talk about worthless comments, this is totally rubish. All IDE (non-SATA) 2.5" drives have the same connector. You can stick any drive from any manufacturer in the laptop. The "custom connector from mobo to drive" is of course already included in your laptop. Not so for the 1.8" drives, since not only are the connectors different size, they're also in different locations. Just take a look at the linked pictures, the Hitachi connector is on the side while the Toshiba is on the back. In all devices that use 1.8" drives, space is a premium, and there is simply no room to convert from one interface to another. The fact is, all products that use 1.8" drives supply only from ONE source, since they need a different mobo design to fit the other drive. If you don't believe me I'll give you $100 if you can fit a 1.8" Hitachi in my iPod or a 1.8" Toshiba in my X40.

OT: Your sig

[renehollan]

I always thought Patton had said "... meanest son of a bitch..." and not "... meanest mother fucker...".

Calling one's self a "son of a bitch" says something about one's opinion about one's mother, and perhaps, the harsh circumstances in which one was toghened up.

Calling one's self a "mother fucker" only says bad things about one's self.

Somehow, I can more realistically see Patton saying the former, not the latter. Are you sure you're not quoting his enemiys' misquote of him?

What I'd like to see next...

[whimmel]

..is how they are going to make the unnecessarily large SATA *power* connector fit these little drives.

Does SATA really need a 4-conductor but 14-contact connector? It's bigger than the damn data cable