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Beyond Nobel, Hard Drives Get Smart
mattnyc99 writes "Giant magnetoresistance got its day in the sun when it won the Nobel Prize in physics last week—and when Hitachi rode that spotlight by announcing they'd have a 4-terabyte desktop hard drive by 2011. It's about time says Glenn Derene over at Popular Mechanics, in what amounts to an ode to the rise and future of super hard drive capacity. From his great accompanying interview with data storage visionary and computer science legend Mark Kryder: 'To get to 10 Tbits per square inch will require a drastic change in recording technology ... Hitachi, Seagate, Western Digital and Samsung ... are currently working on this 10-terabits-per-square-inch goal, which would enable a 40-terabyte hard drive.'"
I'd like to know which factors have allowed (forced?) the disk storage industry to continue to advance at such a steady pace. I am well aware of Moore's Law and Kryder's Law, but these are just observations, not explanations.
Why haven't we seen similar improvements in fuel efficiency or internet bandwidth (in the US at least)?
that video cards will get better, games will get much larger, and of course - we'll all be fighting over which format the game will be on and complain if its blue-ray and we have HD-DVD, and vise versa.
And what will this cost?
Take Nobody's Word For It.
Windows Future XP Gee Whiz Penultimate Enterprise Edition®© will have no problem filling those drives.
When are they going to stop to push down their latest technology innovations down the consumer's throat? Most households don't need a frigging TB of HDD space.
They should direct their sales to the server and business market.
It could also enable a 750-gigabyte 1" radius HD, if they're really clever. Which could serve the Bluetooth wristphone/player we've all been waiting for. So we can stop referring to that mobile multimedia terminal as a "phone", and again more accurately as a "watch".
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make install -not war
4 TB by 2011 means doubling every 2 years. Isn't that a bit slower than the past few years?
The biggest part of our hard disks are spent on movies, music and games.
Most of these are on thousands of computers.
Wouldn't a good sharing/streaming protocol/project be the solution for storage for the average person?
If you mod this up, your slashdot background will turn into a beautiful sunset!
How about devoting some of that space to more built-in redundancy - as an option, more bits devoted as failsafe backup, so when the damn things fail we have a better chance of getting the data back, rather than just a terabyte-pissing competition..
Apart from using RAID, which isnt useful for laptops anyway..
Otherwise, good work, but where is my flying car?
Yeah, in 10 years well be bitching because we wont have enough space for a decent Windows xx or Linux xx install. I must be getting old, because I remember asking how on earth could you fill a 40 Megabyte hard drive.
"I bow to no man" - Riddick
I believe the higher capacity drives will force a rethink on how data is stored and accessed on standalone machines like laptops and desktops. I've only got a couple of terabytes of data on this machine and doing a file search over the five (I think, I can't actually remember how many drives I've got fitted in this thing) disks is already pretty time-consuming. The solution will be to add intelligence to the disk interface so that data indexing is done pre-emptively and the results cached on the fly.
The first generation of hybrid drives are already here but they're only at the beginning of their development cycle. HDD recording densities will increase as will flash RAM densities and that will improve access times but only for the most commonly accessed data.
Imagine a 10Tb HDD built in the classic 3.5" wide form factor, with 256Gb of 1024-bit-wide 150MWord/sec flash memory or MRAM on the controller board acting as cache. The spinning disk becomes a backing store for the flash where data is kept "fresh" by a smart algorithm. The drive spins down intelligently when not needed, saving power and reducing heat dissipation.
Higher recording densities are only one part of the future of disk drive technology.
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And not quantity. Basically something that has a bit more longevity and preferably less moving parts. Or in case the moving parts break, you could just replace them while keeping the "pieces" that store the actual data.
Something isn't right here...
Where are the p0rn jokes?
I work in animation & video production and a single project can take up a terabyte... I'm all for storage increases but I have no idea how to back it all up... It's all very well for the Blu-Ray and HD-DVD club to go on about storing 30/50 gig on a disc but when your drive holds 4 terabytes (and you just know it will fill up quickly) the backup problems just get bigger too...
Putting syrup in coffee is some form of blasphemy.
When I see headlines about 1TB drives, I immediately think of losing 1TB of data.
How about they put a RAID 1 array in a 3.5" form factor? Two separate platters, two head/arm assemblies, two SATA connectors.
Best regards.
A 2.4cm drive has an area (just for this thought experiment) of (1.2 x 1.2)pi, or roughly,4.52 sq cm. now, a 10 inch drive (24cm) has an area of 45.2 sq cm.
So, that would make it a 45 TB drive. Data retrieval might be kind of slow, but: if you have massive RAM caching, it could be of great use. Imagine a home theatre with something like this.
Imagine buying a drive like this that comes pre-installed with every song ever produced by WEA or EMI or Sony/Columbia. Say, everything from 1925 onward. How much would you pay for such a drive?
Or, ALL the movies ever made by (name your favourite) movie studio between (date x) and (date y).
I'd pay some serious green for that. All the classic movies. All the great songs of history.
That's what we're facing, very very soon: the trivialisation of media technology.
And eventually, that 25cm drive holding 45TB becomes a 2 inch drive holding 90TB.
We should be able to predict the arrival of the $500 2 inch exabyte drive.
The entire collection of world culture, audio in mp3, film in mp4, and images in jpg. Japanese, chinese, American, canadian, English, French, Italian, Russian, etc etc etc. on one or maybe two drives, or even one for audio, one for video, and one for images.
what then? with all of audio and visual culture at your fingertips, what will we do with it? what will a society in the future (assuming it doesn't implode with the loss of petroleum, or vapourise itself fighting over it) DO with that much data commonly available. to anyone?
Will it be possible to write a new melody? Will it be possible to tell a new story? Will it be possible to make an image that matters? Some would argue that imaging is dead - eaten alive by advertising. some would argue that film is dead as all the stories are told, and now we're in a grid of "1 from column A, two from column B" kind of mix and match story telling. And some say that even music itself has run its course - washed up on the blandishments of pop, the inaccessibility of the academy, and the dumbed-down rumbling of a sold before it was born hiphop, and an inchoate melange of world music that mimics and fights the imperial culture.
When it's ALL on your drive, who cares? will culture just gradually wither away?
Maybe we will do better when the oil runs out, and the machines stop working. We'll have to sing to each other, and tell stories to each other by the fire, instead of the sitting around having the fire tell stories to us.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
The real problem that I see is that drive bandwidth has not been increasing at the same rate as drive capacity, which means that the time to read/write an entire disk keeps going up.
Maybe it's time that manufacturers start using multiple heads per platter to cut down on seek times and increase bandwidth. I'm sure there are people that would pay for double the bandwidth...why hasn't anyone done this yet?
Windows, osx and most linux distributions come with file index utilities. If you turn it on while installing and leave it on, they work rather well for indexing tons and tons of files/GBs. And if you don't have them running, then you pay for it with having to wait to find stuff. It is a compromise, you are trading computer and cache space for access time. This is used throughout computing, why you think this shouldn't still hold, i dunno.
Forty terabytes? Oh wow, I cannot wait for the terrible piece of software that'll consume two terabytes just to function properly. More space and speed equates to sloppier software.
People discover the meaning of life between getting piss drunk and the following hangover.
The hope in increasing storage capacity is that at some point you'll hit a magic number that will basically mean "unlimited" for your needs. One example is documents. It used to be in the old days you could easily fill up a floppy disk with documents so you started fiddling around with multiple floppies to store your crap. The same was true to some extent for CDs. Once people started burning CDs. Suddenly you had collections of CDs filled with audio and data because each disk simply did not have enough capacity for all your crap. Now we're to ipods and portable external hard disks, which people are still filling, but much slower than the old removable media.
So assume for a second that the growth rate of customer's data is much slower than that of the growth rate of purchasable storage mediums. If that is true, at some point you will be able to buy a virtually unlimited storage medium for your needs. Purchase multiple storage mediums and now you can store all of your data with redundancy. To a degree, this is possible. With compression technology, we've actually been able to "shrink" data while providing similar quality.
The other problem you have to consider is how fast technology gets out dated. It is currently getting harder and harder to find a computer that can read floppy disks as well as people that still own working VCRs. That means that all data left behind on floppies and VCR tapes will at some point be unreadable and lost forever. So if you have a technology that is highly reliable, at some point, the interfaces to use that technology will be deprecated. So while the floppy or VCR may still work, perhaps computers and TVs will stop shipping with the legacy connections to save on cost. So you will find that if you want to keep reading your data, you will have to keep transferring it to new storage mediums. Once that happens, the old storage medium is basically useless. So whether it works or not for a really long time starts to become more of a novelty than a necessity.
Actually, we've already achieved "super hard drive capacity".
If you took one of today's 1TB hard disks back in time to 1985, it would certainly have been called "super capacity".
In fact, almost every new hard drive is "super capacity" if you just take it back in time 10 years.
The term "super capacity" is thoroughly meaningless. What does it mean? 10TB? 1PB? 1EB? 1ZB? 1YB?
That's great and all, but will we still be limited to 4 primary partitions?
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Boycot hard drives. They are stealing Giant Magnetoresistance Nobel Prize jobs from Americans.
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
Complain ?
Why complain ?
By then, most users and all
HDDVD and BlueRay is no real format war and has nothing to do with the old VHS vs. BetaMax stuff. It's closer to the DVD "plus" vs. "minus", because with disc, multi-format are easily doable.
And are actually already done, several companies have anounced multi format readers and burners.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Progress will probably be slow. Einstein got a Nobel prize in 1905 for helping to invent the Laser Printer and it took them ages to turn that into a commercial product.
500GB is sold at $170, 1TB is sold at $350, will 2TB sold at $700 and 4TB sold at $1400? The capacity has increased, but the price hasn't drop much over the years. Harddisk price is making me bankrupt.
I can barely fill my old 40gb drive.
What I want to hear about is reliability and longevity.
Because it's a kludge that chews CPU and disk cycles.
Microsoft was trying to develop WinFS for a reason, and Sun's ZFS is already available. This sort of data management is more efficiently done at filesystem level.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
What I want to know is if these new larger drives are going to come with new restrictions on partitioning the drives. I would love to be able to test drive a dozen or so different Linux distros, see what BSD is like, have a safe (somewhat) place to stick my /home while I upgrade - but I am limited by the number of partitions (got one taken up with winders).I know you can work it all around and do it with just 4 primaries, but it would really be nice to set up 15 or so partitions. Especialy if the drive has 4 terabites. Good Lord, I can't even fathom that much space.
My computer needs more Terabytes
09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
+2 Troll is Slashdot's way of saying groupthink is confused
Better than that, why don't we just have one storage area for programs, and a totally separate one for data? You could have your OS, all your applications, basically any and all executable files, stored in one place that was difficult to change, and then all your data, temp files, states, etc. could be stored somewhere else.
Bet nobody's thought of that before.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
It's 15,5 Gb/mm^2.
Trust me, I work for the government.
you may even be able to write a plugin for ReiserFS (if anyone actually bother to pick up the briliant piece of work that it was)
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
I like the idea of innovating, but what are you going to do with 10TB drive? I understand it may be useful for enterprise but what will the average consumer do with it? I think instead of increasing storage they work on perfecting the storage methods we have now.
Windows on a mac is Windows under Supervision. - Frank Soltis(Chief Scientist/Designer of AS400)
The signs are VERY clear. 'Active' memory is going solid state for many, many reasons (low power consumption, shock resistance, high access speeds, etc.) Motion-based memory will be for backups, large storage needs, etc. and will only be used as required for specific tasks.
The only exception are for industries that really, really need the super-high storage capacities. But most of those places have very different needs than your typical user. The standard user's desktop will probably a health amount of solid memory plus a disc drive that will be for backups, recovery, and as a dumping ground for things you Might Need Later. Laptops will ditch disc drives entirely.
Of course, YMMV for the power users. =)
/// Not a super-genius . . . yet. ///
Mário Norberto Baibich is the first to report the Giant magnetoresistance in 1988, he is the main author in an article published in the Physical Review Letters in 88, where Fert is a co-author .
Why this guy did not receive the Nobel Prize? Strange.....
Reference: http://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/200303/prl-6.cfm
Popular Mechanics???????? Does anyone even take them seriously after they put their foot in their mouth trying to debunk 9/11 conspiracy theories. Stupid idiots should have stuck to "science"
That's the idea. I was thinking that the very small drives that they use in iPods and the like will someday have enough capacity to bundle two into a single form factor and have 'transparent RAID'. Two of the 1.7" (or whatever they are) would fit nicely inside the 3.5" form factor, especially if you shape the mechanisms to spoon each other like a yin-yang.
I suppose a designer would provide one SATA interface, have the mirroring electronics on a board, perhaps with some flash memory like a hybrid drive, and make the 1.7" drives plug-able. If one fails, you pull that failed drive off and plug a freshie in there.
The plug-ability would also provide a migration path for upgrading to larger drives; pull out one of the mirrored 1TB drives and replace it with your new, zippy 8TB drive, let the system re-mirror, then replace the remaining 1TB drive and remirror.
Best regards.