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

A decade?

[ScrewMaster]

Working prototype drives should be available within a decade.

Spare me. I've been hearing about incredibly dense optical storage for thirty years now. I have yet to see it.

Re:A decade?

[janrinok]

Haven't you seen the developments in CDs and DVDs during that last 30 years? Everybody else has! A DVD is an incredible amount of storage when compared to the 5MB (yes MB!) hard drive or even my cassette tapes that I was using in the late 70s.

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:A decade?

[wilsonthecat]

What you're really admitting to is having a 4 x 320gb porno store

Do we even have to say it?

[Dirtside]

I think this story is a dupe from, like, 1993.

Seriously, I can't think of an otherwise plausible tech that's been vaporware longer than light- or holography-based data storage. I know there have been working examples for years, and I think there's even a (really, really expensive, very specialized) production version or two, but come on! How hard can this be?

Re:Do we even have to say it?

[commodoresloat]

Seriously, I can't think of an otherwise plausible tech that's been vaporware longer than light- or holography-based data storage. Duke Nukem Forever?

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?

[Odiumjunkie]

> 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

Probably not in the notebook/desktop consumer market, but I can imagine enterprise/research uses for magnetic HDDs where read/write times are less important and $/GB much more so.

That said, if I'm right, laser-based magnetic storage being faster than current tech won't really matter for that kind of scenario.

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.

link...

[cosmocain]

...to the original publication.

the really fascinating thing is not THAT they succeeded to change the magnet field via lasers, it's the speed if you compare their figures to this

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?

Stupid hype

[imsabbel]

Actually, this couldnt have less to do with data storage (you cannot really focus your femto-second laser down to spotsizes lower than what we currently have in HDs, plus there is no real way for a femtosecond source that not bulky, wastefull and expensive).

On the other hand is the switching of magnetic domains by the polarity of a circular pulse an archivement in itself. But of course fundamental research doesnt interest anybody, so they have to create a stupid "next storage medium" out of it.

No, it isn't really 100x faster

[geophile]

The researchers managed to transfer data at intervals of about 40 femtoseconds, or quadrillionths of a second, about 100 times faster than conventional magnetic transfers

That optimizes a tiny part of the problem. There are two mechanical issues, 1) waiting for the right part of the disk to rotate under the read/write head, and 2) arm motion. Without eliminating one or both of these delays, I don't see how this leads to faster secondary storage access in practice.

Re:No, it isn't really 100x faster

[janrinok]

Which is probably why they said that it will take a decade to produce usable devices. However, that doesn't detract from the discovery or achievement. It is another hurdle passed which will let someone else concentrate on solving the other problems.

Re:No, it isn't really 100x faster

[scotch]

You don't even need a mechanical mirror mover - you can direct and refocus light very quickly using solid state tricks with LCDs that modify their refractive index locally.

Reverse the polarity of the tachyon pulse!

[jollyreaper]

Gary lets us know about research out of the Netherlands that has succeeded in reading and writing a hard disk using polarized laser light. Oh my god, dicking with the polarity actually did fix something! I take back half of the mean things I've said about Wesley Crusher.

Yeah, this is great, but....

[Jamey]

Except that it really doesn't help that much!

Hard drives have gotten bigger, and bigger, and *BIGGER* over the last 20-30 years. But they don't *FEEL* that much faster. They've become wonders at streaming huge blobs of contiguous data out - so why do databases need huge steaming bloody chunks of RAM cache? Because the random access times *SUCK* and really haven't gotten that much better!

Capacity has gone from 5MB to 1TB, but spindle speeds have gone from 3600RPM - up to a max of??? 15K RPM for some really expensive drives? Track-to-Track seek hasn't gone up much. Neither has real nor manufacture's claimed throughput rates.

RAM hasn't nearly kept up with CPUs, either, but the disparity is nothing compared to the hold you get when you have to go after some data from the hard drive that isn't in the cache.

It's so bad, I strongly considered putting 3 4GB FLASH modules with IDE adapters (RAID5 - but I didn't study this to see if 2 8GB with RAID1 might be better, or other variations) into my new machine on the PATA header to act as the root drive, holding everything but /home, /var, and /tmp.

Sequential read speed is kinda nice, but I *do* need to do random accesses sometimes! I listen to my nice little 2TB RAID array all the time, as the heads move back and forth singing their little song.

Bah HD speed

[silas_moeckel]

I can tipple the transfer rate and reduce the average seek time by about the same by using 3 sets of heads. Oh you wanted something thats cost effective please move along. Really though I do not know why they could not use multiple servo motors to at least split the heads already on server class drives, any hardware geeks want to chime in? It seems there is a big push for 2.5 inch SAS drives I cant see why you could not stack some of those platters in a 3.5 and add extra heads and controlling gear? Sure your not speeding up single transfers but your cutting the rotational latency in half and allowing multiple operations at once great for servers.

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.

Ten Years

[Kuvter]

Working prototype drives should be available within a decade. Sweet, just around the time Starcraft 2 and Duke Nukem Forever come out.

Where's my flying car?

[binaryspiral]

Where's my flying car? Damn it - it's still in the labs.