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Toshiba 40GB Perpendicular Magnetic Record Drives

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the hot-new-methods dept.

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.

19 of 277 comments (clear)

  1. Is 40GB the smallest you can buy now? by saskboy · · Score: 1, Interesting

    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.

    --
    Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
    1. Re:Is 40GB the smallest you can buy now? by fredistheking · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

    2. Re:Is 40GB the smallest you can buy now? by vikks · · Score: 2, Interesting

      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.

      --
      Digital is an exercise in precision, while analog was an exercise in controlled chaos.
      [ digitalFAQ.com ]
    3. Re:Is 40GB the smallest you can buy now? by periol · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

  2. Faster... by eviltypeguy · · Score: 5, Interesting

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

  3. 40GB? by dal20402 · · Score: 3, Interesting
    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

    1. Re:40GB? by dj245 · · Score: 2, Interesting

      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.

      --
      Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
    2. Re:40GB? by bmeteor · · Score: 2, Interesting

      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.

  4. Raid 5 for my laptop when? by tacarat · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    --
    "Common sense will be the death of us all"
    1. Re:Raid 5 for my laptop when? by adolf · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

      --
      Kid-proof tablet..
  5. Re:That's awesome. by ciroknight · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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).

    --
    "Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
  6. HDs with two sets of heads? by Michael+Woodhams · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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?

    --
    Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
    1. Re:HDs with two sets of heads? by jcr · · Score: 2, Interesting



      And you've also chosen space over speed.

      -jcr

      --
      The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
    2. Re:HDs with two sets of heads? by Rick.C · · Score: 2, Interesting
      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.

      --
      You were 80% angel, 10% demon. The rest was hard to explain. - Over The Rhine
      "Math in a song is good."-Linford
  7. Re:Lossless! by AussieVamp2 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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!

    --
    Not Free SF Reader
  8. Re:can't wait for the 1TB 3.5 inch version to arri by matt21811 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  9. Re:1.8-inch form factor by kf6auf · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

  10. Re:Informative Video!!!! by UpLateDrinkingCoffee · · Score: 2, Interesting

    "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.

  11. 2.88 Floppy Diskettes by atcurtis · · Score: 4, Interesting


    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)

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    -- Except on one where stupidity was there first.