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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."
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
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 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
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
Yeah, but there will be a million regular HDDs for sale that are mislabeled as ADHDs...
Today is red jello day - all workers must eat all of their red jello. Failure to comply will result in five demerits.
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).
So basically, they reinvented the hard-sectored disk? *confused*
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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.
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.
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?
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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!
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.
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Hrm, I don't seem to have that problem. Maybe I should buy new pants.
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