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

Re:WTF?

[mspohr]

If you had RTFA, you would have learned that the savings in the cost of the platters comes from lower manufacturing / fabrication costs, not the cost of the material. In fact, the foil platters use a more expensive material (stainless steel or titanium).

The real savings comes from the fact that the coating/finishing of the platters can be done on a big roll of foil and the platters can then be just stamped out. Standard platters must be finished individually.

Who Died and Made Cringely Hari Seldon?

[Cr0w T. Trollbot]

Since Cringely isn't nearly as big an idiot as Rob Enderle or John C. Devorak, at least this doesn't seem like rank psuedoscience. But there seem to be an awful lot of unchallenged assumptions about the technology that need to be worked out for it to be commercially viable.

In particular, I'd like to see evidence for the following claims:

"They could design new families of disk drives that held up to three times as much data in the same space, were more reliable, actually cheaper to build, and used 70-95 percent less energy to run than the current state of the art."

I'd sure like to see the assumptions and numbers underlying that equation.

"The technology in question replaces the aluminum or glass platter in your hard disk drive with a "platter" made from stainless steel or titanium foil that is 22 microns or 25 microns thick, respectively. 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. There is no rocket science here, but what science there is is patented."

Gee, Cringe, which do you think costs more: The raw platters themselves, or the read/write heads? I would say the latter. So you're going to drop the costs of hard drives by doubling the most expensive component? Huh?

The advantage of our drives goes beyond enterprise applications. We are able to build cheaper drives, for example, because our platters cost less to make and the nature of our flying heads is such that dust is sucked away from the head-disk interface, meaning the drives do not have to be assembled in a clean room.

Sorry, I'm not buying this at all. You don't think a non-cleanroom enclosure is going to result in data loss on the platters themselves? Even if you're not getting particles during the read/write phase itself, you're getting them on the platter. I'm not buying the logic here.

Who needs flash in general as a mass storage technology? 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.

Sorry, I'm not buying this at all. Until the advent of true Drexlarian nanotechnology, I doubt you're going to see a mechanical action (you still have to move the eread/write heads) beat an eletronic one (reading from Flash).

I'm not saying that the technology Cringely talks about is impossible, I'm saying: A.) There seem to be a lot of unwarrented assumptions underlying his logic, and B.) Implementation always has unforeseen hurldes and obstacles that will make these drives seem like far less of a slam-dunk vs. current technology (or more specifically, where regular drive technology will be 18 months from now) than it appears.

Finally, once it is ready, I'd like to see real-world tests for speed/electrical consumption metrics with existing technology. There might indeed be some savings, but I seriously doubt they are as dramatic as Cringely claims.

Crow T. Trollbot