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The Limits To Perpendicular Recording
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."
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.
A simple video to explain perpendicular recording!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xb_PyKuI7II
Oh, wow, a 3-gigabyte drive! How futuristic!
Seriously, what sort of monkey messed the article up this badly?
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
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.
Stop making it bigger! Start making it faster!
-dave
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There is only so much you can pack into little magnetic domains. It is dependent upon how small of a grain (dust speck) you can individually magnetize, signal/noise ratio to read back that magnetic field and the sensitivity of the pickup head. I can see the day coming when there is a small near-room-temperature superconductor (SQUID) pickup head to do read/write operations. The tradeoff is going to be when you get that small, a single cosmic ray particle can flip a 1 to a 0.
Tisha Hayes
There are other technologies that I'm sure HDD makers have waiting in the wings. If areal density doesn't go up fast enough, I'm sure that HDD makers will go back to stacking platters, and we will start seeing fatter 2.5" drives. Perhaps even a return of Bigfoot drives, or double-height 2.5" drives as a new form factor. Of course, these drives will have to have some engineering done to keep performance.
I can see a full height 5.25", a monstrosity these days, but inside it would have a bunch of tiered storage with the controller doing the work and multiple caches using not just DRAM, but flash RAM, and wise positioning of data (more commonly accessed stuff closer to the spindle for example.)
This is the last resort of drive makers, but I'm sure if nothing else pans out to keep capacities growing, they will start adding platters.
I think a more realistic assessment is that the rate of growth in hard disk densities will decline.
We've had a recent article on the shortcomings of SSDs, but I think the maturity of hard disk technology and the minimum cost posed by the complicated mechanical design will make hard disks obsolete for most applications in a few more years. Hey, people thought 3.5" disks would be here forever, too.
When the only tool you have is a hammer every problem requires a screwdriver.
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.
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.
This is the internet. Facts, spelling, and concepts are all optional.
Nah. TEA is unreadable. Especially the leaves.
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From the summary:
It's great that we can now store 2 TB on one hard drive and that 3-TB hard drives are already feasible.
3TB drives are already well past "feasible". Seagate has one for sale in the form of the STAC3000100 FreeAgent GoFlex Desk. Its an enclosure with a single SATA 3TB hard drive. The reason its currently only available as an external drive is because most motherboards will not support a boot drive that large, hence not a lot of reason to offer it as an internal yet.
I want a new quote. One that won't spill. One that don't cost too much. Or come in a pill.
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106416 Gb/sq.ft.
957744 GB/sq.yd
2966707814400 Gb/sq.mile
It also equals
1.145452290904 GB/sq.mm
114.5452290904 GB/sq.cm
1145452.290904 GB/sq.m
1145452290904 GB/sq.km
Drives that big, you buy them in pairs, one mirrored to the other.
If my "mirrored" you mean "RAID 1", I would say that barely counts as a backup. There are essentially three or four substantial threats for why you need a backup, and RAID 1 protects you against just one of them. (If you're counting, the four threats are (1) drive failure, (2) your power supply committing murder-suicide and taking out your drives, (3) your house burning down or computer being destroyed (you can combine 2&3 if you want), (4) software corruption.
The first rule of backups is "make backups". The second rule of backups is "make backups". But the third rule of backups, if you ask me, is "RAID isn't backups". (The fourth rule is perhaps "check your backups to make sure you can restore from them.")
(What you should do is buy in pairs, put one in an external enclosure, and periodically sync them. Keep the second drive unplugged from everything when it's not actually being synced.)
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.
Except, it can take quite a while to sync two drives of this size. So you will probably find that the second drive spends at least half it's time sitting next to the primary drive.
You actually need THREE drives so one of they is always a safe backup.
The actual rules:
eg: offsite
eg: THE backup must stay offsite, it only comes back when it's not THE backup.
I don't see it happening. At a bare minimum, cache memory will always be faster just because it's baked on to the CPU and it takes less time for the signal to travel there.
Intuition tells me that no matter how fast non-volatile memory gets, it will always be outstripped by volatile memory because you don't have to concern yourself with permanently storing it.