Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Cringely's Shameless Self-Promotion

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the buy-the-cringely-t-shirt dept.

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."

3 of 225 comments (clear)

  1. Flimsier disks & MTBF? by Orange+Crush · · Score: 4, Insightful
    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.

    And what do these thinner materials and more closely-spaced heads do for the MTBF and error rate in such drives?

  2. My first concern... by AKAImBatman · · Score: 4, Insightful
    ...would be the shock resistence of the material. Glass and metal platters aren't going to fold over or have the head rip through them because you hit a nasty pothole. In reading the article, however, I found this statement:

    Our 10-gigabyte 0.85-inch drive can spin up, read or write data, then shut down again, all in less time than it takes to perform the same task using flash while being just as resistant to shock damage and more resistant to heat.

    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
  3. Move it and it dies... by k2r · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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"