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Toshiba Claims Bit-Patterned Drive Breakthrough
CWmike writes "Toshiba will detail a breakthrough in data storage later Wednesday that it says paves the way for hard drives with vastly higher capacity than today, reports Martyn WIlliams. The breakthrough has been made in the research of bit-patterned media, a magnetic storage technology that is being developed for future hard disk drives. Bit-patterned media breaks up the recording surface into numerous magnetic bits, each consisting of a few magnetic grains. Under a microscope, the magnetic bits look like thousands of tiny spheres crammed next to each another. Data is stored on these magnetic bits: One magnetic bit can hold one bit of data. Prototypes of the media have been made before but Toshiba says its engineers have, for the first time, succeeded in producing a media sample in which the magnetic bits are organized into a pattern of rows."
I've heard that patterned media will be too expensive to ever mass produce profitably so the industry will probably use HAMR instead.
So how is this any different than existing HDDs?
This is a hard drive on speed, known as ADHD (Advanced Digital Hard Drive).
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Bit-patterned media breaks up the recording surface into numerous magnetic bits, each consisting of a few magnetic grains. Under a microscope, the magnetic bits look like thousands of tiny spheres crammed next to each another. Data is stored on these magnetic bits: One magnetic bit can hold one bit of data.
Just like every other hard drive! Hooray for the future!
"Toshiba says its engineers have, for the first time, succeeded in producing a media sample in which the magnetic bits are organized into a pattern of rows."
Just like every other hard drive! Oh, wait...
They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it's not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance. - Terry Pratchett
I mean from a technical standpoint, what's the difference between how this works vs how current HDDs work? I thought that currently data is already stored magnetically...
notice where it says: "One magnetic bit can hold one bit of data."
In soviet Russia, God creates you!
From what I read in the article, it looks like Toshiba's reduced the number of magnetic grains per bit from a few hundred down to just a few. Otherwise it appears everything is the same.
They claim that this will increase the density 5x.
I eat only the real part of complex carbohydrates.
Except that current HDDs use a wider area of surface to write the data too as compared to this.
I'm kind of curious; after the "Get Perpendicular!" video, how's Toshiba going to top Hitachi in the "silly video explaining your new technology" race?
After reading TFA, I'm almost scared that it'll involve some sort of cartoon magnetic grain orgy.
It's really quite obvious. Current drives have continuous media. Put very simply, this tends to "smear out" the magnetic field, because there is no magnetic break between the N and S poles of one bit, and the poles of another. This has two bad effects: unreliable bits (location in space), and the possibility that bits will simply flip as the head passes over them. By isolating very, very small domains in a structured way, with nonmagnetic regions between them, the problems are avoided since the bits, being isolated from one another, will not be subject to domain creep or interference.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
here is a link which might explain things more clearly
http://www.bentham.org/nanotec/samples/nanotec1-1/Piramanayagam.pdf
RTFA, it's enlightening, not all that technical, and not TLTR. And you really should learn how the hardware works; writing software is a LOT easier if you understand the underlying mechanics.
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What's your problem? I'm not upset. Not even the slightest little bit.
Because HDDs aren't the past and aren't going away anytime soon? It's no different than the fact that 3.5" floppies and tape drives and tapes are still sold despite being proclaimed as being "the past" and dead.
If it lights a fire under both their asses to get to the market at an affordable price, who cares?
I am a v1ral sig. Plse c0py me and h3lp me spread. Thank y0u?
Because solid state's main hold back has always been capacity. Magnetic media capitalizing on it's main selling point isn't unexpected.
Besides, I see the future is being a mix. Solid state for my boot drive containing all my programs and such. Magnetic media for my Bittorrent and iTunes drive where I need space but not speed (afterall write speeds to those drives are limited by my dirt slow internet speed, and read speads only have to be quick enough to keep up with playback).
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
If there's a 1:1 correlation between "number of physical bits" and "number of virtual bits"... does it really matter? "Megabyte" being binary or decimal matters, because they're different sizes with the same name - a "binary" megabyte (1024^2 bytes) and a "decimal" megabyte (10^6 bytes) hold different amounts of data.
A "physical" bit on this storage, and a "virtual" bit in memory hold the same amount of data, from what the article says... so why would this cause all kinds of confusion? One is the physical implementation, one is the software representation of it.
I make $N million a year selling hard drives. But wait! Flash drives are the future! I don't need to spend any money making my hard drives better; I'll just sit out the last 5-10 years' worth of profits in that business. Someone else can have them; I don't mind. Really. No worries at all. It's only money, after all.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
It's bad enough we already can't tell whether a "megabyte" is binary or decimal. Now we can't tell whether a "bit" is physical or virtual.
--
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But, bubble memory was more expensive than the hard drives they were intended to replace. Now, we are focused on using various flash memory schemes to accomplish the same feat. Is flash memory related to bubble memory? Who knows, but it fills the same niche, so I'm saying that flash enherited bubble's legacy, to replace hard drives with solid state, non volatile memory
As far as Optical Buses go, isn't that pretty much dominated by Fibre Channel? We use it to connect processors to processors and SANs to processors, so that seems pretty bus-like.
So, maybe the trademarks died, but these products are based on the tech that came before them.
Wherever You Go, There You Are
RIAA must be rolling on the floor having a seizure right about now...
I'm really exited to hear this:
Toshiba expects the first drives based on bit-patterned media to hit the market around 2013.
When was the last time we heard about a new tech breakthrough that wasn't followed up with "5 to 10 years" ...Though it might be 5 years by the time the price drops enough for the avg consumer.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
For those who are too lazy to RTFA, here's a very simplified explanation of what's going on:
In current drives a bunch of rather randomly sized and shaped magnetic grains are basically "glued" to the surface of the drive, and the collective orientation of a certain number of those grains (called a domain) determines whether you've got a 1 or a 0.
In this, instead of dumping grains onto the surface, they're using lithography to carve very precise grains onto the disk, which can be made much smaller and more identical in shape, than the random ones allowing for vastly higher storage densities. It's basically applying the same technology used to make computer chips to make hard drives. The technology has actually existed for a while, but the cost per bit to pattern lithograph a hard drive has always been huge; I guess Toshiba has figured out how to bring it under control. Cool stuff.
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You know, I deliberately posted a different version of this summary specifically because the summary that was selected here is a lazy cut-and-paste of the poorly written lead of TFA itself.
And not only wasn't my superior summary not selected, but it's been deleted from the firehose page, where it should appear between Minority Report Style Iris Scanners in Mexico and Cats Lies and the Research PR Machine.
Slashdot has gone from valuable to random, and is going from random to stupid.
However the smart hard drive vendor would realize that spinning platters are headed out the door, and that they should invest in solid state technology, lest they be left in the dust. There's nothing really stopping the availability of high capacity SSDs except cost. You can already get 1.28 TB SSDs with insane speeds (1.1 GB/s read, 1.5 GB/s write), if only you're willing to pay the cash. As prices come down, there will be no reason to get a spinning platter drive. Notice how all the SSD makers are not the big HardDisk makers. They should be shaking in their boots, because a large part of their business is going to go away within 5 years. If spinning platter makers don't change something soon, their market is going to be reduced to a small fraction of what it was.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Personally, I avoid dropping electronics, especially ones with moving parts, on to the floor. Or any other surface, for that matter. Helps a lot.
HTH, HAND
psssst
See how I used the word bit there to describe something really tiny? Maybe that has something to do with its referencing the physical "bit". As in, it overlaps both the digital bit and the physical bit. /whisper
Yeah, but there will be a million regular HDDs for sale that are mislabeled as ADHDs...
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It's bad enough we already can't tell whether a "megabyte" is binary or decimal. Now we can't tell whether a "bit" is physical or virtual.
A megabyte always has been and always will be binary-based.
MB is not an SI scalar, nor did it ever pretend to be, nor is it conflicting with the SI scalar M.
The only confusion comes about when you try to insist that MB is infringing on some sacred, arbitrarily-based notion that all major scalars must be factors of 1000.
The "classical" units and scalars are themselves ambiguous. What does M mean? Meter? Mass? Minute? Mega? Milli? What does G mean? Gram? Giga? The gravitational constant? Is K kilo? Is it the spring constant? Is it Kelvin?
You can impose all the capitalization and styling rules you want, but the bottom line is that people cannot distinguish the 17 ways you write the letter "u", nor will they replicate them easily or reliably.
People read technical descriptions in context.
When you see MB, you KNOW you're talking about megabytes, and you KNOW bytes are binary. If you fail at this, you're either a marketer for storage devices (liar), or you should not be working with computer-related things.
ADHD? Any relation to Toshiba's other advanced technology HDDVD?
>>>One magnetic bit can hold one bit of data
Why? Telephone modems can store 8 bits per symbol. Surely there must be some method to encode more bits per chunk of magnet.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
For the uniformed: with today's technology, a 1:1 correlation between data bits and magnetic "bits" is nearly impossible. We have to interleave data bits with clock bits, so we are able to count runs of equal bits. So the data bits are encoded on this interleaved stream of data and clock/sync bits before it is actually stored in the physical medium. If the bit-patterned layout doubles as a clock/sync mechanism we can store only the data bits (with error correcting codes too, of course).
My write speed is usually limited by the fact that some large memory program gets swapped out to disk, and needs to get swapped back in. Or Some other app that has nothing to do with what I really want to get done decides to start thrashing the hard drive. If all everyone ever needed was to play mp3s, or watch a video, without doing anything else, we wouldn't need solid state drives. But once you start doing stuff that's quite intense on your drive, you start to realize why it would be nice to have a drive that can read faster for all your data. Once SSDs get up to around 2TB, people won't care about how large hard drives are. Because for the most part, SSDs will be big enough, and most people don't want to shell out and buy 2 drives.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Tape drives, sure. 3.5" floppy drives? Seriously?
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
However the smart hard drive vendor would realize that spinning platters are headed out the door
Like 3.5" floppies and tapes, right? Oh wait...
Interesting to know - but as a mostly uninformed sort... is this an argument for using some sort of other term for them, or does this suggest that there is NOT a 1:1 correlation between physical bits and virtual bits?
I'm not clear on what you're trying to say here, other than to share this info about how it works.
You don't think they've bit off more than they can chew with a bit in their mouth?
Whether they call it "bit" or "mite" is rather irrelevant, IMHO, as long as it doesn't lead to another stupid acronym. What's important is that it isn't ambiguous, and it doesn't seem to be.
So basically, they reinvented the hard-sectored disk? *confused*
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Parity bits and other similar forms of error correction need physical bits, but don't provide any virtual bits to anything outside the drive itself. The number of (accessible) virtual bits will be lower than the physical number. On the other hand, a drive with built-in compression would offer more virtual bits than it has physical ones.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
Yes, those markets have been completely decimated by other storage solutions. Sure some floppy disks are sold, but the number of disks has taken a drastic hit in recent years. I imagine the same is true for tapes. People will still buy hard drives for many years to come, but if the only thing you sell are spinning disk hard drives, like Western Digital and Seagate, then you should be really worried, because while the market won't dry up over night, over the next 5 years, the market is going to diminish.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
No, that would be magnetized areas read in circular columns.
There is not a 1:1 correlation, but there might be now. With all physical bits being data bits we could gain up to 100% more data bits on the same area.
Yes, but this one has sectors one bit long.
Yes.
Parent has history backwards. Disks were invented, and measured in megabytes, back when bytes were not necessarily 8 bits and computers were not necessarily sold as "binary" machines. The typical disk record was 80 bytes long, since it came from a Hollerith card. The IBM 1401 was typically sold with 4K bytes of main memory. Four thousand 6-bit bytes.
We'll call them phybibits and vibibits and then you won't have to worry.
but if the only thing you sell are spinning disk hard drives, like Western Digital and Seagate,
Oh Rly?
> Once SSDs get up to around 2TB, people won't care about how large hard drives are.
Yes, and 640k is all that anyone will ever need.
Meanwhile, there are already those of us that not only imagine a use for more than 2TB
of disk space are actually using much more than that already. Just let granny loose with
a hi def video camera and watch that disk space quickly disappear.
Already still cameras seem like something to inspire an Odo rant from DS9.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I'm sure the next thing will be the bits (in base 10 of course) that are available before the ECC, clock bits, sector relocation table, and other niceties are put in. Similar to raw capacity versus formatted capacity, except before the critical HDD functions are factored in.
Spinny disks just upped the ante here by a factor of 5.
Meanwhile, serious SSD's might become cheap enough for a consumer to consider eventually...
Knowing that something like "entire movies stored on your computer" is inevitable someday is one thing. Expecting it tomorrow is another.
Sometimes it takes 10 or 20 years for reality to catch up.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
actually, you can still buy the 2.88MB floppy drive, IBM MF356F-815MB, but it's $130. The SCSI TEAC FD-235J 5604 2.88MB SCSI floppy can be had for $290
Backing up a 1TB hard drive is a trivial concern when measured against the cost of a 1TB SSD.
The gulf in price between spinny disks and SSD buys a lot of redundancy.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Some people will probably need a car analogy to sum it all up.
Ok - in LA you have seventeen or so lanes of traffic. But because they are all headed the same direction, they all sit at a standstill pointed the direction they are supposed to be going.
Now compare that to Cairo, which has cars going every which way along with camels and a million pedestrians per square mile. In Cairo everyone sits at a standstill, but they may not be pointed where they want to go, with the single side benefit that they can buy figs at any time from a local street vendor.
Wait, what was the subject again?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Obsolete 2TB spinning platter device = $99.99
New hotness 640GB flash device = $14,500.00
Oh, well then... There's nothing really stopping me from being the next Governor of California. Jump on the bandwagon for my inevitable victory!
I can still buy Atari 2600 systems, accessories, and games.
Doesn't mean shit.. its still dead tech, just like the fucking floppy that you think isnt dead.
"His name was James Damore."
were originally the same size as the US currency in use in the late nineteenth century have to do with anything?
Punchdcards were later shifted to 96 columns and the dimensions of the card shrunk from the old format (which I still remember fondly along with my old IBM 29 keypunch,) to these tiny punch cards.
None of this made any sense back in the nineteen-seventies and none of this makes any sense now.
A typical record was an integer divisable fraction of the 19k 3330 DASD write buffer length when I was working for CN back in the late nineteen-seventies.
Later when I was responsible for coming up with an archiving scheme for Canada Post, when the so-called records could be scanned images of payroll records from the nineteen-thirties and forties, there was no such thing as a fixed format for an employees' file and the hundreds and thousands of transaction records.
Depending on a fixed format record layout is something reprehensible only a unit-record fascist would do.
Reality is a lot more flexible.
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In the past, there was always some exponentially bigger media file people werent storing yet.
But today not only are we storing movies, we are storing them encoded at state of the art resolutions in the native format that they are available at commercially. We can increment up with twin-stream stereo video (aka 3D), and maybe a few doubling of resolution. There just isnt any orders-of-magnitude storage demand increases on the movie storage front.
Previously, there was always some next exponential thing that wasn't handled. From Text to Images to Audio to Movies. Its always been media driving the storage needs of desktops.
My question to you is simply this.. what is the next exponential demand? There isnt any media left, so I think you are just grasping at the "640K" meme at this point.
"His name was James Damore."
Well if we want to get pedantic, and we do since this is slashdot, a byte isn't always 8 bits. An octet would be 8 bits. So I suppose it should be Gibi Octets or GiO for gigabinary octet rather than GB for gigabyte.
Of course if someone hands you a computer I'd suggest you place money on a byte being 8bits. Chances are it is. Also, I'm not seriously suggesting we start using KiO, MiO, GiO, etc... Just poking a little fun at the industry.
Get offa my lawn you damned kids!
Just fyi, but this was not due to a 'unique' floppy drive format, but rather a defective floppy drive controller.
The device was sold as being 1.44MB PC compatible, but the floppy drive was unreadable by any other 'standard' 1.44 MB floppy drive.
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/archive/index.php/t-10293.html
This might seem trivial to you, but in the days before USB flash drives, it was a major pain in the ass. Toshiba could have avoided the whole thing by just licensing a decent controller, or properly testing the one the use. However, they went for the max profits, and IMHO, deserve all the ill will that they generated
Wherever You Go, There You Are
When will we get the fun song-and-dance explanation of the technology, just like we did when perpendicular recording was coming out?
If the boundaries between the bits are more "discreet", then they are more hidden. If the boundaries between the bits are more "discrete", then they are more distinct, and presumably will interfere with each other less often.
-Your friendly neighborhood Grammar Nazi
For someone nitpicking someone else's lingual mistakes, it's ironic you missed the fact that it *wasn't* an example of incorrect grammar!
:-P
BTW, *this* is a grammar Nazi.
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Today: New technology overcomes previous limitations!
Tomorrow: Limit of technology predicted! Oh noes!
Day after: New technology overcomes previous limitations!
I'm not upset. Not even the slightest little binary digit.
Here, fixed that for ya! Now should be totally and unambiguously clear for tech nerds too, you linguistic oriented geek!
<mumble>(could never understand how the humanity still manage to exist, with such fuzzy and ambiguous ways of communicating and mentally operating with notions and notion and terms that do have a clear definition)</mumble>
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With SSDs prices and lower capacities, HDD still have room to grow a little bit. If you can get a 3.5" HDD with whooping 10TB of space for 300usd or whatever they price it at, HDD will still be a viable choice for a long time, specially for desktop PCs.
You are thinking about it kind of wrong. At the physical layer, one bit. At the software layer, it can and maybe will be a symbol or other compression done by ASICs. The difficulty with compression is that more data comes up missing per bad sector/bit of media.
I am speaking in general terms because I am very removed from industry specific knowledge of hard drives.
I want to see the PizzaAnalogyGuy version!
In his absence, I'll come up with one. Say you're storing data on a pizza in the layout of "sausage" (seasoned ground beef pieces) over the pizza's surface. If you just put the sausage on top of the cheese, you need fairly large areas of sausage to make discernable areas. But if you lay down a grid of pepperoni first, you can put a piece of sausage or nothing on each piece of pepperoni.
I see the future is being a mix. Solid state for my boot drive containing all my programs and such. Magnetic media for my Bittorrent and iTunes drive where I need space but not speed (afterall write speeds to those drives are limited by my dirt slow internet speed, and read speads only have to be quick enough to keep up with playback).
Then what kind of storage do you recommend for a GarageBand and iMovie drive? These are for the interactive creation of works, so they need speed, but the works are digital signals as opposed to text, so they also need space.
My write speed is usually limited by the fact that some large memory program gets swapped out to disk
If you swap for a reason other than putting /tmp on a RAM disk, then you need more RAM. If you cannot fit more RAM in your PC, then you need a motherboard that isn't nearly a decade old like the one in my PC.
The smart hard drive vendor would realize that spinning platters are not going anywhere, especially in large enterprise situations where a LOT of money is to be made, and that if you increase the density of the platters (5x according to TFA) then you can also increase the performance of the drive to possibly match or exceed the sequential read speeds of current SSD.
Spinning platter HDD are not going anywhere until SSD prices become CHEAPER per byte than regular HDD. Regular HDD technology is still improving, as witnessed by this article, and there is no telling when it will slow/stop, or when SSD technology will slow/stop. It is perfectly conceivable for technology to get to a point where SSD can no longer increase in capacity without increasing physical size, while spinning platter may continue to increase capacity with the same form factor. It is also possible that spinning platters may some day greatly exceed the performance of SSD.
You sound like the kind of person who would be surprised to hear that tapes are still widely used for backing up and archiving data.
In the beginning, SSDs were ridiculously expensive because it was for early adopters and others with plenty money to spend. The prices were in freefall and people were making extreme extrapolations based on that. But then the bottom hit in that this many flash chips makes a rather expensive bill of materials. I bought my SSD in April last year. The same model is still on sale for 83% of the cost and the cheapest SSD of same size is now down to 65% of that cost.
At those rates it will be many, many years until SSDs can compete on cost/GB because they're still about 8 times as expensive. Yes, there are plenty other reasons why SSDs are great but it'll take not only the 25nm process shrink Intel is making the end of this year but probably also the 18nm process - which is still very much in the research lab - before SSDs really hit it big. Right now there's huge differences between controllers because companies are still figuring this out. But in the slightly longer run, it's flash production that'll really determine the fate of SSDs.
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Thousands of tiny luminous spheres, I presume
Dude, if you need to see an iPhone to know if someone is gay you are in serious trouble! Have you noticed how your ass keeps being fondled every time you are in a crowd?
Hrm, I don't seem to have that problem. Maybe I should buy new pants.
"All these years believing you're the signified monkey, only to find out you're just a big hunk of nobody cares."
The first hard drive using a read head based on giant magneto-resistance was commercially released about 10 years after the effect was discovered.
Spinning platter HDD are not going anywhere until SSD prices become CHEAPER per byte than regular HDD.
SSD needs to become cheaper per byte, yes. But not to the extreme of becoming cheaper then magnetic media in order for it to take off. At some point, it will become "cheap enough" to become useful to a wider range of customers.
Right now, we're a bit above $2/GB for MLC-based SSD while magnetic drives are in the 0.07/GB to 0.12/GB range (3.5" 1TB $70 or 2.5" 500GB $60). Which is about a 16x cost difference right now. And magnetic drives have a price minimum of around $40-$50, below which you won't find units for sale at retail. There's a base materials cost to be dealt with along with the prices of the rare earth magnets and circuitry.
So, on the $/GB side, SSD has a long way to go. But what about the fuzzier "big enough for practical purposes"? Well, that's probably in the range of about $1/GB or maybe 0.50/GB. When you can get a decent amount of storage in something that costs less then $100 to $150. A decent amount of storage varies by person and by purpose, but for general PC usage that is not heavy on multimedia recording/editing, something in the 100-200GB range is the current sweet spot.
I think, if you could drop a 200GB SSD for $100 or $150 into your laptop, most people would jump on the chance. Even if there was a 1TB magnetic for about the same price. The performance increase of using the SSD over the magnetic would vastly outweigh the storage capacity of the 1TB unit.
But, the 256GB units are still around $600 ($2.34/GB). So we're definitely not there yet. And the low-end of the SSD price curve seems to be closer to $80-$100 instead of the $40-$50 for magnetic hard drives.
Personally, I think the magic number is $1/GB for SSD. Which might happen next year.
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
I can go to Ebay and buy an ST506 hard drive as well. Dose not mean it is not definitely in the past.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
So Western Digital has 3 offerings, and isn't even easy to find on Newegg, as you have to go to SSD category, look at the list of Manufacturers, and then click on a link to see all the tiny manufacturers that don't even matter. It also has much lower performance than all the other drives. It only has 170 MB/s write speed, whereas most of the competition is up around 270 MB/s. And the Seagate drive can't even be found on NewEgg, and clicking on the "Comparison Shop" link on the site you did link to just goes to a dead end. After a little searching, I couldn't even find an english site to buy the thing on. Although you could probably supply me with a link, it doesn't matter, because for the most part they are unavailable at all the major retailers, so people won't buy them. So, while they do have SSDs, their offerings are terrible, and they are way behind the times. They need to play catch up with all the other manufacturers in a big way if they want to compete in this market.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Because solid state's main hold back has always been capacity.
SSDs have plenty of capacity. The problem is price per unit capacity. You can get 1 TB SSDs . . . they just cost over $3000. (But one of them claims 1.4 GB/s read/write speeds. Nice.)
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Telephone modems operate at the hardware level too, and yet store 8 bits per transmitted symbol.
It should be possible to do the same with the magnetic symbols on a disk, if the head could read the "level" of the magnetism (from 0 to 255) at each location. Even if we could only do levels 0 to 3, that would allow us to encode 2 bits per spot on the drive instead of just 1 bit.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall