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Toshiba Boosts Hard Drive Density By 50%
An anonymous reader writes "Toshiba has unveiled a ground-breaking technology that boosts recording density by 50% on an 80-GB, 1.8", single-platter drive. Using what it calls Discrete Track Recording technology, Toshiba was able to pack 120 GB storage on a single 1.8" platter. The new development will hugely benefit media player, UMPC, and ultra-portable laptop segments where 1.8" drives with maximum possible capacity are in great demand."
...they say its easier to add the grooves in small form-factor hdd's, but they didn't say if it can be done at all in a standard sized drive
stuff
"TOKYO, September 6 /CNW/ - Toshiba Corporation today announced ..."
i think of this...
George McFly: Lorraine, my density has bought me to you.
Lorraine Baines: What?
George McFly: Oh, what I meant to say was...
Lorraine Baines: Wait a minute, don't I know you from somewhere?
George McFly: Yes. Yes. I'm George, George McFly. I'm your density.
sigs... don't talk to me about sigs....
How does this affect the read/write speeds? Sounds like it could go either way. On the one hand, less distance = less time, but on the other could it also be a more complicated pattern = more time? (Sorry, I'm not really a hardware guy.)
I'd rather R&D be put into solid state hard drives (e.g. flash). I can't count how many hard disks I've gone through.
Now I have to wait longer for SSD to become the clear winner.
80 GB is enough for anyone. Seriously - if you need more than that, in a portable, then the data better be elsewhere - if you lose the portable, you've lost a lot of data.
How about 80 GB, but 50% less power? I want 80 GB in my Zaurus CF slot, that I can use all day.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Imagine if the humble telephone dial had received this much effort and technology. What would THEY be like now?
1. Samsung had announced their 120 Gb 4200 rpm 1.8" drive a couple of weeks earlier (http://home.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/i ndex.jsp?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20070820005213 &newsLang=en), but there's no sign of it available yet.
h iba.htm) is 3600 rpm with CE-ATA interface, not really suitable for notebooks, even ultra-portable ones.
2. The Toshiba 120 Gb drive, according to PC Watch Impress (http://pc.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/2007/0906/tos
I'd guess the new iPod Classic uses the Toshiba drive, since it supposedly uses even less power compared to their previous 1.8" drives. But if this is the case, it means I can't just rip it out of the iPod to plug into my laptop, since the interface doesn't appear to be compatible with their previous 1.8" drives.
However, I still hope that at least one of these make it to the retail market. It would be nice to be able to double my current 80 Gb drive.
...Toshiba's patent just says to take out the MFM hard disc controller, and replace it with their new RLL controller. I tested this myself and got my 10MB drive to a full 15MB without a single problem!
Yeah, this is great and all, but its still a toshiba drive. Whats next, IBM bringing back the Deathstar( read deskstar) hard drives that radomly turn themselves into glitter?
Their reputation for cheap, and poorly performing, drives will probably keep them in the shadow.
And yes, I am a seagate/maxtor fanboy. I still have a 1.6gb maxtor from 95 that works fine.
There is an article about discrete track recording that explains it pretty well. Using materials with different magnetic properties they are able to map channels onto the platter (hence the 'discrete'). Presumably this might would be cumbersome to manufacture for larger discs, but less so with smaller disks.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
So, why don't they apply it to 3.5" drives too?
Why don't we drop the moving part drives? Can't flash memory and/or battery backed RAM drives replace hard drives?
Sure, you could say that now. But just remember, one Bluray disc will be able to hold that amount of data in a few years. Personally, I think it would be sweet to be able to have all three extended editions of Lord of the Rings in HD and 7.1 audio tracks on one device.
They're solid state. To me that means that every bit is as close as every other, near enough.
It should be possible to deliver far more bandwidth from an SSD than through magnetic media.
But the best claims I've seen for SSD are about 10MB/sec.
Where's my pen drive that's capable of 480Mbps? Where's the SATA attached SSD capable of 3Gbps?
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I think they used to do this on some very old drives. (Big ones, not 3.5" AFAIK.) Also, when you think about the evolution of hard drives, remember that they came from drum systems where there was one head for every track on the drum, so it wouldn't have been a particularly foreign concept to the guys designing the earliest ones.
IIRC, it's not as effective as you might think it would be at first glance. Although it does help some workloads (ones that are seek-limited), I don't think the improvements were enough to justify the technical complexity, which is fairly significant -- especially when it comes to writing or doing simultaneous read/writes (and I don't know how you'd handle cache). Also, apparently you might run into problems maintaining head alignment between multiple servo/head assemblies working on the same platter [1].
The fact that the drive manufacturers gave up on it, and didn't bring it back out back when people were paying much more for fast storage than they do today (relative to consumer/mass-market equipment), makes me think there must have been multiple levels of 'gotchas' involved.
[1] Someone who sounds more knowledgeable than I responding to a similar question: here.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
That's a common misconception. They actually make the hard drive run faster.
"When the atomic bomb goes off there's devastation...but when the atomic bong goes off there's celebraaaaation!"
I'm all for flash-storage as well. it's faster, uses less power, makes less noise, etc. also, my HDD's make some awfull noise too, when turning on the machine. after that it's fine. (( and well, how often do I turn it off/on? ;_) ))
[ irc.p2p-network.net -> #zomgwtfbbq ][ http://zomgwtfbbq.info ]
Yeah, isn't it about time these engineers start thinking forward instead of investing all their R&D into should-be-already-obsolete models? Maybe it will take Steve Jobs to kill off hard drives once and for all.
Why do people keep making this assumption? We've been using flash drives for years in our products, they have certainly got faster, but so have hard drives. The fastest flash drives you can get are still an order of magnitude slower than an ordinary sata drive.
... that using 'ground-breaking' while talking about technology was taboo nowadays? GB != Ground-Breaking
Can we get some statistics on reliability? Has reliability been once again sacrificed in the name of storage density? Will drives only last 6 months instead of a year now?
LS
There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie
they wont release a solid state drive for a long long time,m for several reasons. its fast, efficient, and could be cheap if mass produced. the drives we have now arnt as reliable, hence we need to keep buying them to replace the ones that have died. how many solid state ones would be bought? a 1 TB ssd drive would hold me for a long long long time. but as it is, i need to keep buying drives cause they keep dieing. as for the police uses, ssd would be bad, hard to read deleted stuff off it. there might be a shadow in ram of what was once written. with a platter, the shadow will be tehre even after 10 times of 0 writing the drive. we wont see solid state for home use for a long long time tick
However I don't think I can donate $500 for the phone:( Maybe a $200 price cut is in order, as long as the early adopters don't get pissed.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.