100x Faster Hard Drive In Lab

Gary lets us know about research out of the Netherlands that has succeeded in reading and writing a hard disk using polarized laser light. The researchers claim this offers a 100-times speedup over reading/writing using magnets. People have been trying for years to write data using polarized light; the secret of the current work's success lies in its disk's materials — gadolinium, iron, and cobalt. Working prototype drives should be available within a decade.

Comments

Hard Disk?

[mcfedr]

Hard Disks are old news...no one is going to be using them in 5 years, let alone 10...flash is so the way forward

Re:Hard Disk?

[Spy der Mann]

Actually in 10 years, flash will ALREADY be obsolete. It'll be replaced by phase-change RAM or Nanotube memory.

Re:Hard Disk?

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't think so. Flash is pretty much at its max arial density that it will get, so if you want more bits on a flash chip, you will have to start having a larger physical size.

Flash is also not a stable read/write medium... write the same sector a couple thousand times, and you won't have a sector anymore.

Faster how?

[DaleGlass]

The article is unclear on the details. Are they making a hard disk with an optical head? In that case will it really help that much, given the problems with making the disk spin faster, and the seek latency? There are 15K RPM drives already, only they're a bad idea for consumers as they're noisy and require cooling that's not available in most consumer oriented computer cases.

Re:Faster how?

[DaleGlass]

Yes I did.

Hard disk speed comes from several factors:
Data density: The more densely it's packed, the more data per second passes under the head
Rotational speed: The faster it spins, the more data per second passes under the head
Latency, a combination between the seek latency (how long it takes the disk assembly to move to the location), and rotational latency (how long it takes for the platter to rotate to the required position), determines how long it will will take the disk to start reading data from somewhere else.

They don't explain how the laser is mounted. If the laser is sitting in the same place as the current magnetic head, then that the head can potentially read/write 100 times faster doesn't really matter, when there's no way the disk itself can be made spin 100 times faster. 7200RPM are about the fastest you can stick in a normal case without extra cooling without it melting.

So, the disk can't be made to spin much faster, making the assembly move much faster is difficult and bumps into rotational latency anyway, and they aren't packing data more tightly because they admit the footprint of their laser is bigger than used by current tech. So again, even if their head can read/write 100x faster, does it even matter given that it'll never be given the opportunity of doing so?

Re:A decade?

[ASBands]

1 TB Hard Drive

I'm sitting next to two computers right now, both running Ubuntu. One was purchased in 1996, the other's hard drives were purchased three years ago. The one from 1996 has a 16 GB hard drive, which, as I recall, was the biggest Gateway offered at the time. The other has four 320 GB drives on a RAID 5 (960 GB/894 GiB), which, as I recall, was the second largest behind the 500 GB drives at the time. 30 times larger in about 8 years.

Perhaps you've heard of perpindicular recording, which started early last year. Pretty soon it's going to be impossible to get a hard drive that doesn't have this new technology. You can easily argue that the technology can't go anywhere after this, but it does offer a 10x storage density increase, and you know somebody will be cramming more data blocks on a platter soon enough.

You see, the great thing about hard drives is that they're not critical to the operation of your computer. My Myth frontend has a 40 GB hard drive. The backend, located in a different room and accessed through the network, has 8 500 GB drives on a RAID 5. With the ever-increasing speed of networks, putting things somewhere else is getting easier every day. Sun has taken this idea to the next level with Project Blackbox. Another great thing is that if you need more space, it's fairly easy to just add another drive to your contraption - something you really can't do with processor speed or memory (to a certain point - 4 GB per stick is the highest I've seen).

I see your point - we don't want a datacenter in the basement of every home, but we don't NEED a better system of information storage NOW. There are a lot of ideas out there; most will fall through, but we'll get one, eventually, and that one will make all the difference in the world.

Re:A decade?

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps you've heard of perpindicular recording, which started early last year. Pretty soon it's going to be impossible to get a hard drive that doesn't have this new technology. You can easily argue that the technology can't go anywhere after this, but it does offer a 10x storage density increase, and you know somebody will be cramming more data blocks on a platter soon enough.

Blasphemy. No mention of perpendicular recording is complete with out a link to this.

Re:A decade?

[Xeriar]

Most of the PC-using population doesn't have much use for more processing power right now, but we can all use a bigger hard drive.

You must be joking - in fact I was tempted to mod you funny instead of posting. Just about all of my customers, family and friends would love their computers to be even faster, but 80% of them aren't even using 20% of their drives. And not a one of the latter group has balked at the price of an external HD, to say nothing of DVD burning options.

In the mean time, I would still like to play Oblivion faster, and one of the simulations I'm writing is hell on the processor. Data storage, on the other hand, is plentiful, though more RAM or some equivalent would indeed be nice.

Re:Bah HD speed

[Fweeky]

"I have always wondered why drives couldn't be configured with two independent arm assemblies" They can, it's just not worth it; it's a lot of additional expense and complexity (and thus reduced MTBF) all for a very low volume part, when most people would prefer you to just make a physically smaller, cheaper disk so they can get more of them when needed.

Read-write on all platters at once isn't really feasable because the tracks aren't going to line up reliably; leaving aside imperfect manufacturing, components aren't all going to see uniform levels of thermal expansion or vibration, and even microscopic differences in where each head settles will leave you screwed -- lining up with one track will, most likely, be mutually exclusive to lining up with a second, and get worse from there.

Of course IANAHDM.