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Seagate Hits 1 Terabit Per Square Inch
MrSeb was one of several readers to submit news that drive manufacturer Seagate has announced (and demoed) the first hard drive to squeeze a terabit into each square inch of platter.
"'Initially this will result in 6TB 3.5-inch desktop drives and 2TB 2.5-inch laptop drives, but eventually Seagate is promising up to 60TB and 20TB respectively. To achieve such a huge leap in density, Seagate had to use a technology called heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR). Basically, the main issue that governs hard drive density is the size of each magnetic 'bit.' These can only be made so small until the magnetism of nearby bits affects them. With HAMR, 'high density' magnetic compounds that can withstand further miniaturization are used. The only problem is that these materials, such as iron platinum alloy, are more stubborn when it comes to writing data — but if you heat it first, that problem goes away. With HAMR, Seagate has strapped a laser to the hard drive head; when it wants to write data, the laser turns on. Reading data is still done conventionally, without the laser. In theory, HAMR should allow for areal densities up to 10 terabits per square inch (magnetic sites that are just 1nm long!), and thus desktop hard drives in the 60TB range."
"Seagate has strapped a laser to the hard drive head"
Well, there goes my hopes for an intelligent discussion.
"A week in the lab saves an hour in the library"
STOP! It's HAMR time!
MPAA says this will cost the entertainment industry billions of dollars every year.
"Let's face it, we're not changing the world. We're building a product that helps people buy more crap - and watch porn."
Can current motherboards handle that?
Do you mean would PC manufacturers would design in arbitrary limits in their hardware and/or BIOS that would create some kind of "barrier", so that disks that are too big won't work with the system?
That's highly doubtful. Nobody would be that stupid... would they?
HAMR Head Sharks can hold two frickin lasers! Take that you great white hater!
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
HDDs can read or write like a bat out of hell as long as they don't have to do much seeking
Bullshit. SSDs have passed that mark a few years ago.
SSDs are transfering 500-600 MBytes/sec, while the mechanical ones are still there in stone age at 128 MBytes/sec (148 if you wanna live with an insanely noisy and power hungry one).
Its only Capacity/dollar, and that one got close already. Don't kid yourself, this is the dying breath of the HDDs.
To give you a real world example: my next setup(next month) is a raid of 6 cheap SSDs with a total capacity of 3 TB and transfer speed of 3 GBytes/sec. Yes, you read that correctly, that's 3 GIGABYTES PER SECOND with a cheap home system. You go right ahead and wait for 2 fucking hours for your 50 GB Bluray image to be copied/processed on your mechanical toaster; I'm sticking with my 1 minute with complete silence and low power consumption.
HDDs are dead to me already.
60 TB might seem like a lot now but I am sure that humanity will figure out new ways to fill the capacity. We always do.
So... much.... porn!