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

Flimsier disks & MTBF?

[Orange Crush]

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?

My first concern...

[AKAImBatman]

...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.

Centrifugal force

[Xocet_00]

Ideally, the disks would be spinning so quickly that the outward force would keep them almost perfectly flat. Assuming the disks were very smooth and the internal atmosphere of the drive is gas-only (no dust - a safe assumption) there would hopefully be very little turbulence within the drive to cause fluctuations in the flatness of each platter.

In my lab we coat floppy materials (like plastic) in a spin coater at several thousand RPM. At that speed the disk may aswell be rigid.

He just gave a talk on this...

[Rhys]

At the UIUC Reflections|Projects ACM conference. It was actually a fairly interesting talk (http://www.acm.uiuc.edu/conference/2006/webcast.p hp) about the same topic, maybe a little more in-depth than the article. At least more pretty pictures than the article.

Re:Cringely's time machine

[itwerx]

Forgot to mention, the reason film isn't used is the coefficient of expansion. There's no temperature regulation in drives (yet) and there isn't a film material in existence that doesn't expand and contract with the temperature. That's actually one of the reasons glass was introduced awhile back, data densities were getting so high that even the rigid metal platters were moving enough to become a factor.

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.

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:Speed control

[Svartalf]

Uhm... That's NOT quite true... Cut the power off, the disc eventually stops spinning because of friction, etc.

You need to supply a constant input of angular momentum to keep the discs spinning. Spinning a
smaller mass will ALWAYS mean a lower power input, from start to finish and everything in betweeen.

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

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

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:The Gyroscope Effect

[drakaan]

two words from the article: "air cushion" apply deductive reasoning as to how much more those two words matter when coupled with a flexible platter. There's actually plenty to read in the article, and I have lots of specific questions, but shock scenarios were something that cringley specifically addressed (like not having to park the heads or use "uh-oh" sensors to detect imminent shock, etc).

Not sure who the multiple HDD vendors are that will be introducing it next year, but I'm sure they asked a lot of questions about that, too.

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.

Move it and it dies...

[k2r]

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"