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Nanotube Lube Replenishment for Massive Drives
PetManimal writes "Techworld reports that Seagate has just patented something called 'Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording,' which features nanotechnology and could lead to a 1.46TB 2.5-in. drive. The article says 'Storing data properly in extremely small areas requires the magnetic material to be heated during the writing phase, but this causes the lubricant film deposited on top of the magnetized recording layer to evaporate. Seagate's patent resolves this problem by having a reservoir inside the disk casing that contains nanotube-based lubricant. Some of this is periodically pumped out as a vapor and deposited on the surface of the disk, replenishing the evaporated lubricant.'"
Some of this is periodically pumped out as a vapor and deposited on the surface of the disk, replenishing the evaporated lubricant.
Hey, I could use some of this this! Oh wait...it says disk...
This guy's the limit!
Lube replenishment?
For.... massive drives?
Some headlines just write themselves. And don't mod me down, you were thinking about how cool it would be to have a peripheral that would do that - this is slashdot, don't lie!
Can I get the KY Jelly version to store all my pr0n?
"No matter where you go, there you are." -- Buckaroo Banzai
I wonder if this will lower the mean time to failure of these drives? I currently have some old 9G scsi disks that have been running daily since 1998/1999 and still work flawlessly. How much lube are they putting in these drives? It seems to me this could be bad thing(tm) put enough lube in for 3 years, and every 3 years sell new drives.
oogly boogly!
Another patent!
I got my Linux laptop at System76.
So when we see the warranty on those disk, it won't be 1 year, it'll be 8760 hours. I mean, talk about throw-away society. These things would come with probably extremely toxic non-refillable containers that are guaranteed to be emptied out at the most inopportune moment.
Does everything include nothing?
so when the resivoir empties, your 1.5TB of data evaporates with whatever is left over of the nanotubes?
.. But, after reading about this days ago, I was under the impression the lubricant itself wasn't 'nanotube based' but rather was distributed across the platters in a controlled fashion via nanotubes. Insofar that the tubes themselves only allow a certain, small, amount of the lubricant to escape and only when the absence of lubricant on the surface produces enough differential pressure to allow it.
And, incidentally, the ten year life of the lubricant reservoir should be sufficient IMHO. I can't imagine in ten years we'll still be using the same hard drives anyway. I think Seagate is banking on it.
TLF
I do not respond to cowards. Especially anonymous ones.
Doesn't this mean that your drive fails when it runs out of lube (and therefore you have to replace the drive)?
I mean, I don't know how many people are going to want to take their hard drives in for the equivalent of an oil change or a fill-up every few months or once a year. We've had cars for 100 years and some car owners still don't understand you have to change the oil every some-odd number of miles. On the other hand, we've had computers for 20 years and some people still think that the computer has a cup holder. (See yesterday's tech support stories discussion).
--
So who is hotter? Ali or Ali's Sister?
Do you think it will help speeds if I lube my internets before I stick them in the tubes?
If this signature is witty enough, maybe somebody will like me.
This could spawn a new industry. Our PC's are already going liquid-cooled. Now they'll burn oil too. How long will it be before Jiffy-Lube services both your car and your laptop every 2000 miles?
Trying to use sarcasm in text-based forums does not work.
It depends what you use it for. Great for archives and other infrequent write operations. Not so great for swap space, OLTP databases, etc.
In any case, I can't think of any hard drive that I haved kept in active use for 10 years.
"No matter where you go, there you are." -- Buckaroo Banzai
Digital pron? Check
1.46 TB? Check
Lube Replenishment ? Check
Ok, confession time. Who's already masturbating to this article?
and oh yeah so after whatever date 5 10 yrs (whatever they decided to supply the tubes for the drive will be done it appears.
actually I am happy to see you, however that is in fact a banana in my pocket.
everything starts to look like it needs a Nano Assisted Information Lubricant
Is density really the problem ?
We need FASTER access times.
We need multiple read/write heads.
Get lubricated?
There are 0x40000000 types of people: those who understand 32-bit IEEE 754 floating point, and those who don't.
These are 1998 vintage Sun 9G and no-name 9G ATA drives. Still running. Many more 1999-vintage 9G's out there, maybe 5% of our total. Still useful for such clusterable "applicance" applications as DNS servers. Nevertheless, when the machine dies (more likely due to a 99-cent CPU fan locking up) we just chuck the whole machine.
Considering that the latest drives are far more reliable than those old crappy things, a finite 10-year life for a disk drive is definitely Planned Obsolescence for Filling Up Landfills. Bah!
If they will offer a liberal trade-in allowance for recycling, then OK. Pretty much 100% of our disks are mirrored anyway.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
I can!
:)
I used to work at an ISP that has atleast 3 SCSI HDD's there that have been spinning non-stop (sans power outages) since 1993. They are still in production too, which is insane. But, thats not my problem anymore.
Can all fish swim?
So telling users that they have to change their Hard Drive fluid isn't so flippant anymore. Bummer.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
This will rapidly create a new DIY lube-refill industry to parallel the ink kit method.
In fact, the ink-refill-kit people should band together, form a cabal, and get a business process patent ASAP!
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
a chunk of foam, or felt, leather, or a small hole,
or just use a lubricant that evaporates at the right rate without needing any porous impediments.
The inkjet cartridge racket is invading our storage! Run away!
Are those Nanotubes like smaller internets?
I wouldn't mind you in my head, if you weren't so clearly mad -Lews Therin Telamon
There's now way in hell I'm going to bring my properly functioning hard drive to JiffyLube...
I can see it now: "Well, sir, we can just do the nano-lube for $19.99. But when we had your drive open we noticed the, uhhh... tacheon field was misaligned. We can fix that for just $199.99"
Funnily enough my server is using a pair of 1.5G drives that I was given for free. Are they old enough for you?
XP is basicly 98 with a lot more extra features to hunt down and disable. --Dram
I thought the next limiting factor for hard drive densities was the limits of physics with respect to magnetic materials? So there's no need to get perpendicular?
Then, you "get lubricated".
And everyone has been complaining about the limited number of write cycles of flash memory.
Looks like the technogies are reach equivalence by making Hard drives worse !
I know I'm a little dense, but where would the lubricant evaporate to?
I mean the HDs built today are sealed to prevent dust and moisture from coming in. wouldn't it also prevent moisture from leaving?
If the lubricant condenses to the lid, it would seem there would be a way to capture and recycle it. You shouldn't have to run out.
Better yet let it run in a lubricant bath - then you avoid evaporation and application of it all together.
-CF
What flavors do the lube come in?? I would like a cherry 1.5TB drive please...
"But this one goes to 11!"
How much power will the heating process consume? The 2.5" form factor for laptops is pretty meaningless if the drive is going to suck a lot of power and/or run as hot as hell.
Use a hammer! (HAMR get it!)
I think what we truely need is to get past the PCI, (Pci Express works but there has to be a better way. oh while your at it improve the battery so we can have endlesss power with little weight... Cold fusion would be great while your at it.
A few years ago, maybe more than a few years ago, Seagate had massive problems with the lubricant in their 20 MEG hard drives. In essence, the lube was slung to the edge of the platter where it built a little ridge and then the head would run in to it as it parked. This made the head "stick" and rendered the hard drive unreliable. Frequently if we held the hdd just right we could unstick it with a gentle rap on a table edge.
The moment I read this article, I thought of the old stiction problem. Maybe this is unfair but, when your gut tells you something, it is usually right to trust it until proven wrong. I think I will avoid the first models of these drives. I'll let someone else lose hundreds of gigs of unbacked up data. But, maybe I am just paranoid. But heat and dried up lube just doesn't sound like good reliable HDD technology to me.
Was that one of the monstrosities that used bundles of coax cables as interconnects? Or were those an even older series of drive?
I remember seeing a DEC system once and it used a lot of odd connectors and runs of coax between the drives and the processors...I'd never seen them before, and never since.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Whats the betting the lube runs out at the same time as the warranty. A bit like the sealed for 'life' bearings you get where life means ' until it breaks or wears out'. And being really cynical, a 'Server Quality' drive for twice the price has .00001 cents worth of extra lube.
I have worked with these lubricants. They have high vapor pressures and migrate all over all surfaces inside the volume where they are sealed. Probably good idea to have something equivalent to a saturated sponge inside the disk drive. Don't see the need for nanotubes. I would worry more about the motor bearings failing.
Firstly, what's the problem with PCI in relation to hard disk storage?
Secondly, if you're so sure there "has to be" a better general-purpose connection standard than PCI-E, then could you tell us all: 1. Why you don't even know what it's called, and 2. Why we aren't already using it?
I'll give you a clue, since you could use one badly: 1. It's called Infiniband, and 2. The hardware needed to justify using it over something sensible like PCI-E in the first place costs more than a house.
O rly? If you happen to hear a given song on the radio, and ten years later you write a song that happens to be similar, you have infringed copyright. See Bright Tunes Music v. Harrisongs Music and Three Boys Music v. Michael Bolton. So what is the substantial difference in scope between copyright in a piece of music and a patent?
Given this web site, are you talking is or ought?
It has no means of external user replenishment?
Two words: planned obsolescence.
Nano-lube runs out == time for a new drive. Period.
figure out what the warranty on your retail drive is because it comes up as OEM.
Go ahead, give it a shot. If you've purchased a drive recently then go to their site and type in the info - it's likely that it'll come up as OEM w/ a 1 yr warranty instead of the 5yrs. If you want the 5 then you'll have to take photos, provide proof, and even THEN they won't update the information.
Thoroughly confused how a company that leads the other HD manufacturers can't get an inventory/warranty system to work properly.
that is going to be designed obsolete by its engineers in 5 to 10 years.
It seems alot of trouble to use this drive just to have to re-replace it again in
such a short period of time. Is there any quick backup or archiving thoughts
on how you would protect your data.