Slashdot Mirror
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 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.