Slashdot Mirror
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."
I should read the FA, but what's to stop his platters from flopping all over the place?
The
And what do these thinner materials and more closely-spaced heads do for the MTBF and error rate in such drives?
That's quite a bold claim! If his claims are accurate, then we may be looking at the future of hard disk drives. Micro-disk drives would become the latest hotness, and Flash would disappear entirely from our memory. IF the technology works, that is.
Time and speculative investors will tell if it's really everything it's cracked up to be. I certainly hope it is, but extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
You didn't RTFA before posting did you. It discusses head crashes.
I seem to recall in the late 80's and through the 90's a removable cartridge drive system known as Bernoulli drives. They had "floppy" media (mylar, though, not foil), The drive would spin up the disk, then insert the heads, which were like hard drive heads - floating over the surface rather than the more standard pressed against the surface (a la Zip/Floppy drives).
Ah, Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernoulli_drive
Basically, this drive is similar, just in a self-contained format rather than a removable cartridge solution?
Though, bumping the drive while spinning could do a lot of damage from precession of the platters causing the material to warp. Fast spinning disks are miniature gyroscopes.
The heads only have to touch the film a few times before the emulsion is history.
We use glass because it's dimensionally stable, easy to make extremely flat, and it's about as rigid as you could want it to be, regardless of whether the disk is spun up or not.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Now imagine what happens if you tilt the drive.
The hub now has to transfer a force rectangular to the foil-plattern's surface - fast - to tilt the rotating plattern inside the drive.
But the foil-plattern want to stay where they are (think bicycle wheel)
A foil doesn't provide much resistance rectangular to it's surface. The process is called "folding" if done exactly or "crumpling and head crashing" if done in a foil-platter-drive. Maybe it would even be called "cringling" then?
Do I make any sense to you?
Coincidently the CAPTCHA for this posting was "weakness"
Sure traditional Hard Drive manufacturers may be in jeopardy if they don't license this technology but don't discard flash just yet.
First thing flash has over this technology is *proven* reliability. This new technology can't buy that for money nor love.
Second thing is that this technology has *nothing* over flash (except maybe extreme temperatures, but special flash chips exist too). Performance is not said to be better than flash (you can't beet nanoseconds to access data in flash).
The only thing it has over flash at the moment is a cheaper price. Have you seen flash price trends over the last two years? I would say that it roughly obeys an inverse Moore Law (where prices for a same capacity are halfed every 18 months).
Flash chips are nothing but plastic and silicium. If Sandisk our however started feeling some heat from this new technology they could *ALWAYS* lower the price, hoping to make it up in volume.
At the moment flash manufacturers are at max capacity and are structuring their prices to maximise profit IN THE CURRENT MARKET CONDITIONS. If a new competitor comes out with a ground breaking technology they will find a new price point to maximise their profit then.
Flash, inlike hard drives cost almost nothing to produce, their marginal cost is virually pennies, unlike tens of dollars for HDs. They currently support investment costs and high margins, but in a differnet market configuration they could outprice these new disks and ramp up production.
Flash is the future, its already here but the chip companies have no incentive to make it any more affordable than it currently is, they are milking us just like OPEC does with oil.
If somebody invents tomorrow a car that recharges in 3 mins and has 500 miles range and same performance and price as regular cars, the oil barrel will drop to $15 overnight, it's the same thing.
It's all about supply, demand and marginal costs.
Artificial intelligence is no match for natural stupidity
Another way to think about it is:
How much energy did you need to keep 1 TB of data online in 1980?
How much does it take today?
I would say the disk drive mfgs. have done their part.
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.