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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
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....
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.
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!
And yes, I am a seagate/maxtor fanboy. I still have a 1.6gb maxtor from 95 that works fine.
I was a seagate fanboy until 3 months ago. Lets just say that evening I could hear the (2 month old) 500gb seagate in my basement before I put the key in the door. (sounded like a circular saw)
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Your hard drive was likely still under warranty through Seagate -- did you look into it and see if they would replace it for you? I've had very good luck with Seagate data storage over the years (*knocks on wood*). Although the Google report on hard drives scares me still. http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/02/ 18/0420247
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"
It will be faster. seek time is a major factor in hard drive speed.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
I'm not the only one with this experience either.
safe to say, i wouldn't be crowing too loud about seagate drives.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Your hard drive was likely still under warranty through Seagate -- did you look into it and see if they would replace it for you?
I imagine that is the least of his worries. When I lost an 80GB drive a couple years ago I would have gladly paid several times the price of a new one if I could only have gotten the contents back. While a free replacement drive might lessen the blow somewhat--as geeky as it might sound--losing a hard drive with gigabytes of content you really care about is a gut-wrenching experience. Everything from my high school days (homework, projects, work, programming, games, music... everything) was gone in one fail swoop.
The only thing similar to it is having your house burn down. Sure insurance should cover it all, but there is no way to get back what was really lost. I suppose if nothing else it taught me the importance of hardware redundancy, though it seemed a high price to pay at the time.
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
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-1 BS.
Seagate drives are the only ones I know of that still have a 5-year retail warranty. Why didn't you replace yours, then?
So, why don't they apply it to 3.5" drives too?
Yea, I guess you're right about that. But if that had happened to me, I would have at least tried to get my money back out of the drive by shooting for a replacement and reselling the new one (bare minimum). However, losing a single drive from Seagate probably wont cause me to move to another manufacturer...then again, I have a lot of backups since I have lost smaller harddrives in the past from other manufacturers. Either way, it is still a major inconvenience and I certainly understand why you might not even worry about it after that.
It was just happy to see you and welcoming you home.
Yeah, well, backup is a good thing to do. I've built myself a script to find 4G, prompt for disk and burn it, validate the burn and, if burned correctly, nuke the files, eject and move on to the next 4G. It works well, and at >$.30 for 4G it's cheap and fast. Not reliable enough for the paranoid, perhaps. If not, suck it up and mirror a couple cheap smaller drives.
Why don't we drop the moving part drives? Can't flash memory and/or battery backed RAM drives replace hard drives?
Please keep in mind that this data is not scientific. i ALWAYS advise my clients to keep their important data in more than one place, because HDD failure is so common. I have noticed that Western Digital drives have the lowest failure rate (once again not-very-scientific) I've only replaced three this year. and two of those were over 5 years old used in the same room with an X ray tube.
It's great Toshiba is pioneering new technology, but I'd like them to make their existing technology work first.
"10001110101 - periodic table with a centerpiece of mind" -Clutch
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.
link please?
suse10
Heh, sorry, it's not good enough to release (currently broken). I integrated it with my sql disk indexer and it got kind of big. The core is not much more than growisofs and dir compare. The rest is java to sort by filesize and create growisofs command. Perhaps I should get it good enough again.
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."
Well, if you didn't mind paying thousands of dollars, you could certainly have had a data-recovery service remount your dead drive's platters with a new r/w head and get the data out...
You must be new here.
"When the atomic bomb goes off there's devastation...but when the atomic bong goes off there's celebraaaaation!"
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 wouldn't worry about doing anything so complex if you want to backup your files. Simply archive your filesystem - or as much of it as you can store at a time - and then split the files and burn them to DVDs. Rather simpler and you don't have to hunt through everything to find the files you wanted, they're exactly where you'd expect on the FS after you restore.
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 ]
While a free replacement drive might lessen the blow somewhat--as geeky as it might sound--losing a hard drive with gigabytes of content you really care about is a gut-wrenching experience. Everything from my high school days (homework, projects, work, programming, games, music... everything) was gone in one fail swoop.
With external hard drive prices these days, you have zero excuses for not having a backup.
I keep everything that must be kept in a separate folder, and I drag that to my external backup drive every once in a while. I lost my primary drive just a few weeks ago, and was back up and running with all my data in a matter of hours.
For extra bonus points, buy two external drives and keep one of them off-site (in your car or something).
I agree, 640KB truly is enough for anyone
Yeah, the sql indexing is useful for finding a single file among many when mass archiving... rather a different solution than straight backup. Using the sql disk index I had actually built up a Fuse VFS for NSM serial controled optical jukebox. ie: 'cd /jukebox/disk32/; ls; mplayer file.mp3' would set disk32 as the curr, list files from sql index, then load disk 32 and stream the file. It's not far off working, actually...
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.
When I lost an 80GB drive a couple years ago
I feel your pain friend... I lost almost 3T of data a couple weeks ago, but it wasn't due to hardware failure... it happened on a RAID-6 array. An automated chkdsk munched all of it. I bought the hardware because, like you, I've lost data in the past due to unforseen failures, but just when you think you've covered all the angles, something else reaches out and bites you in the ass. It still goes to show though, that absolutely nothing can truly replace a proper backup, not even RAID.
Fscking Checkdisk...
Boot Windows, Linux, and ESX over the network for free.
I had to do this to an old 20MB PC/XT drive a couple of years ago. I remember it costing only $300-$500. The turn-around was amazing at three day from when I sent it out (red lable). I recovered most of the data except where heads crashed on the platters. Anyone remember the good old days when we parked the HD heads manually?
you are quite correct. I had purchased a pair of them two months prior due to running low on space here. I had a collection of many smaller drives, 160gb through 320gb, that I copied the contents off from and set aside to see how the new drives worked out. About a week before the "event", I repurposed the smaller drives.
Needless to say that sent me scurrying for the pile of smaller drives, many of which I had not reformatted yet. I did lose quite a bit of data though which is unfortunate. The only good note on that was a lot of it I wa able to rebuild. I have the entire babylon 5 series of box sets here which I had ripped, and I had to re-rip them all. (took about 3 weeks)
Up until now I have relied on purchasing what I consider high quality drives, and by keeping a very close eye on them by running weekly automatic surface scans. Drives that start failing scans get replaced immediately. This vigilance was no help to a catastrophic sudden head crash.
When I took it back to Best Buy they were ready to give me another. I was not too happy with the idea of getting another one, so I opted for store credit instead. I used that credit and some added coin to buy a pair of 1tb maxtors. Maxtor has been true crap in the past but they seem to have improved quite a bit. I now have 100% of my data here mirrored or better. I'm done trusting my data to any brand. Redundancy is the only way to go. Still bugs me that I have the other seagate 500 still in service, but it's fully mirrored to one of the maxtors so I am not so concerned.
In addition to the data loss, one must factor in the inconvenience involved. It's like getting a new car and having it spend 1/2 of its first three months in the shop getting various defects fixed that keep coming up. A frustrating experience that makes the idea of a warranty much less comforting,
This experience also inspired me to burn several DVDs of the truly irreplaceable data such as family history records.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
"I suppose if nothing else it taught me the importance of hardware redundancy, though it seemed a high price to pay at the time."
/home backup to a different hard drive just to be on the safe side (just in case I had accidentally told Kubuntu to reformat my home partition). With that one stroke of paranoia, I've "only" lost the last six months of my computing life (passwords, emails) rather than the last two years (that was the last time I had done a backup). I didn't backup my web site, so it's a total loss. It's not that big a deal, though. I should be able to get the important content back through Google.
My primary hard drive died yesterday without any warning. My big mistake was to run fsck and let it automatically repair errors. I should have just immediately hit the power button, installed a new drive, and dd the old one. That may not have worked either, as Linux was reporting hardware buffer errors on every few sectors, but at least the filesystem for the readable inodes wouldn't have been automatically rewritten. Almost everything on that drive is a total loss (sigh).
The silver lining is that when I switched from Fedora Core 6 to Kubuntu in March of this year, I did a complete
Now I'm looking into building a dedicated RAID 5 backup server. The expense is a small price to pay for peace of mind.
It's 3x the cost, but I always buy disks in sets of three:
- One as the primary
- One to be mirrored in RAID1 with the first
- One to put into a normally-offline backup server, mirrored to the primary disk once a night or so with rsync
A bit paranoid, but I haven't had any data loss with this strategy, and the maximum possible is just 24 hours of data loss. With current disk prices, I think it's worth it.
... that using 'ground-breaking' while talking about technology was taboo nowadays? GB != Ground-Breaking
"That which does not kill us makes us stranger." -Trevor Goodchild
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
1. Daily backup: RAID1 or network share (I prefer the latter, I then get a more selctive share of useful directories)
2. Long-term: External disk or offsite via sftp. (It's one of the things I use my linux box at my parents' place for)
Then again, I learned my lessons the hard way, I'm not going to pretend I used to listen...
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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
You might like to give my Yet Another Rsync Backup Utility a try. It's very simple, but also very reliable as well.
Be nice to people on the way up. You will meet them again on your way down!
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.