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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.
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.
Have a look at soylentnews.org for a different view
...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
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.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Except that it really doesn't help that much!
/home, /var, and /tmp.
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
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.
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