Cringely's Shameless Self-Promotion

wild_berry writes "The latest edition of Bob Cringely's column at pbs.org, entitled Shameless Self-Promotion: Bob's Disk Drive is up. He's talking about replacing the glass or metal platters in present hard disk drives with foil platters in order to save energy." From the article: "The materials cost more but we use so much less of it (the disk is so incredibly thin) that the total material cost is substantially less. This 'floppy' material has the same kind of magnetic coatings used on standard disk drives and our drives live on the same technology growth curve as those others. The way we obtain greater storage density is simply by putting more platters in a drive (say 12-15 instead of 4-5 in an enterprise 3.5-inch drive) because they are much thinner and can be stacked closer together. The only parts of the drive that are significantly different are the platters and the heads and the heads vary only in having an extra slot."

Comments

Quick...

[Anonymous Coward]

Get out the tin foil...umm.. okay, it's alrealdy in there

Re:Too floppy

[AKAImBatman]

it sstill must be strong enough not to shear itself off the spindle....

*ahem*

According to TFA, they'd use extremely strong materials like Stainless Steel or Titanium to ensure the rigidity of the disks. They claim that this would be just as shock resistant as a Flash drive, but with faster seek time. (i.e. the lighter weight would mean less inertia to fight against)

Re:Too floppy

[AKAImBatman]

Yes, but what about gyroscopic forces?

I'm not sure. Did I mention that they'll use the strength of Titanium or Stainless Steel to ensure rigidity similar to that of thicker aluminum or glass platters?

*snap*

I knew I forget something. :P

Re:Flimsier disks & MTBF?

[TopShelf]

Don't forget the benefits from recycling all those old floppy disk jokes, though - the comedic savings to society as a whole would be huge...

Re:less energy consumption ?

[trongey]

Think nothing is impossible? Try slamming a revolving door

Actually, modern revolving doors have a breakaway feature so traffic can go straight through in emergencies. If you try hard enough it is quite possible to slam one.
Just thought you would like to know.

Re:Cringely's time machine

[itwerx]

...in the Article.

Are you suggesting I RTFA?!? Egads man, are you insane? Just imagine the implications if we all RTFA! There would be no threads like this, Slashdot would shrink to a mere story-posting site, moderators would be begging in the streets, we'd all have lives - the horror...!! [sob]

:)

Re:just spin them all the time

[drinkypoo]

You can assume whatever you want but the article repeatedly mentions that they can be spun down, and that their spin-up time is less than a half a second (at least for small drives) to be read. Making assumptions when the FA is there for you to R makes an ass out of you, and umption.