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The Limits To Perpendicular Recording

Posted by kdawson on from the moore-was-a-piker dept.

peterkern writes "Samsung has a new hard drive and says it can now store 667 GB on one disk, which comes out to be about 739 Gb/sq. in. That is more than five times the density when perpendicular recording was introduced back in 2006, and it is getting close to the generally expected soft limit of 1 Tb/sq. in. It's great that we can now store 2 TB on one hard drive and that 3-TB hard drives are already feasible. But how far can it go? It appears that the hard drive industry may start talking about heat-assisted magnetic recording again, soon."

15 of 222 comments (clear)

  1. Heat-assisted magnetic recording? by FooAtWFU · · Score: 4, Insightful

    When the only tool you have is a HAMR, everything looks like a nail.

    --
    The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
    1. Re:Heat-assisted magnetic recording? by noidentity · · Score: 2, Insightful

      When the only tool you have is a HAMR, everything looks like rust.

      There, fixed that for you.

  2. I knew this was a kdawson post... by elohel · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Most of the time I never comment on how dumb a synopsis is...but HOLY SHIT. I had to log in and comment to just complain about how terrible this is. NEWS FLASH: Technology has finite limits! In other news, fire is hot and humans eat food. More at 11. "It appears the industry may start talking about heat-assisted magnetic recording again, soon." Thanks for actually saying nothing. Your comments to the article are completely useless. This is one of the reasons why slashdot gets on my nerves, what useless junk.

    1. Re:I knew this was a kdawson post... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      Bullshit. He's right. Slashdot is a sack of shit sometimes. And instead of simply not reading it, he's complaining in the hopes they get a small message eventually and maybe strive to be better.

      In the long run, people talking about what a declining news site Slashdot is should have some effect.

      Kdawson should never have been allowed to speak here. Slashdot was supposed to filter out this type of garbage.

  3. Stop Making It Bigger. Start Making It Faster! by MankyD · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Stop making it bigger! Start making it faster!

    --
    -dave
    http://millionnumbers.com/ - own the number of your dreams
    1. Re:Stop Making It Bigger. Start Making It Faster! by Monkeedude1212 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      That's what the SSD market does.

    2. Re:Stop Making It Bigger. Start Making It Faster! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      You joke, but I would love to have a slow 4200RPM half-height 5.25" drive able to store 10-12 terabytes for mass storage. It would be perfect for home media servers where access time isn't all that important, and it would be more than fast enough to handle HD video.

    3. Re:Stop Making It Bigger. Start Making It Faster! by X0563511 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      You say slow, but at that density the throughput will still be quick.

      --
      For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
  4. Re:TFA is unreadable. by Jazz-Masta · · Score: 3, Insightful

    However, more density also provides a way to higher capacity 3.5" drives, which means that Samsung is now able to build 2.7 GB and 3.3 GB hard drives with four or five disks, respectively. Such drives are rather unlikely however, as we would expect the density to grow to 750 GB per disk, which could enable 4-disk 3 GB drives.

    Oh, wow, a 3-gigabyte drive! How futuristic!

    Seriously, what sort of monkey messed the article up this badly?

    This is slashdot, in the 12 years I've been wasting time here, I am more surprised when they get a story with all of the facts, spelling and concepts correct!

  5. Hard drive are gone, floppy style by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Forget hard drives, currently they are the main bottleneck in your computer, SSDs and the like are the future.

    Actually we can even see now that ram is obsolete, once SSD catch up in speed (you don't even need current ram speed) why would anyone care about transfering data to ram, work on it then store it back? Just work straight on your data, gone are the days of saving, now will be the days of deleting, temporary working directory...

    hard drives, they ain't part of the future me thinks.

    1. Re:Hard drive are gone, floppy style by Guspaz · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The fastest RAM available today operates at roughly a thousand times faster than flash (SSDs are only fast because they tend to have many channels (Intel uses 10) in order to improve performance), and RAM speeds continue to increase by moore's law. It's unlikely that flash will ever catch up, and the limitations of flash (wear) would make it completely unsuitable, even with large improvements in number of usable cycles.

      What it could be useful for is as a shadow to RAM for fast hibernation support. Imagine a computer with 4GB of RAM and 4GB of flash (with a suitable degree of parallelism for speed purposes). If you do a decent job of keeping that flash relatively up to date with the contents of system RAM such that there is a relatively minor difference between system RAM and flash at any given time, hibernations could be done in under a second, and restoring from hibernation could be done at better than SSD speeds even if the computer is using a cheaper magnetic disk.

      If you were smart about it, you could even resume execution almost immediately after you copied a bare minimum of data, and allow the user to interact with the system while the rest of memory is copied from flash to RAM, handling any uncopied data the user requests on the fly.

    2. Re:Hard drive are gone, floppy style by sexconker · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Actually we can even see now that ram is obsolete, once SSD catch up in speed (you don't even need current ram speed) why would anyone care about transfering data to ram, work on it then store it back? Just work straight on your data, gone are the days of saving, now will be the days of deleting, temporary working directory...

      This is the dumbest thing I've ever read.

    3. Re:Hard drive are gone, floppy style by Matt+Perry · · Score: 2, Insightful

      This is the dumbest thing I've ever read.

      Welcome to the world of tomorrow!

      --
      Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
    4. Re:Hard drive are gone, floppy style by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      If non-volatile memory speed ever catches up to volatile memory speed, a "working area" (i.e. what people commonly know as RAM) will no longer be necessary. This is not a dumb idea. It's a possibility.

      Your post is the Unfunniest Score:5 Funny that I've ever read.

  6. Re:TFA is unreadable. by Monkeedude1212 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    This is the internet. Facts, spelling, and concepts are all optional.