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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.
Anyone know what the performance of these "perpendicular" drives will be like compared to today's accepted methods?
But I know we'll be hearing about it here on /. when we get perpendicular 3.5" drives. OMG 1.5TB pr0n!!1
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"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
-- The universe began. Life started on a billion worlds...
-- Except on one where stupidity was there first.