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Data Storage Pioneer Wins Millennium Technology Prize
jones_supa (887896) writes "The British scientist Stuart Parkin, whose work made it possible for hard disks to radically expand in size, has been awarded the Millennium Technology Prize (Millennium-teknologiapalkinto). Professor Parkin's discoveries rely on magneto-resistive thin-film structures and the development of the giant magnetoresistance (GMR) spin-valve read head. These advances allow more information to be stored on each disk platter. Technology Academy Finland — the foundation behind the award — justifies the prize by saying that Parkin's innovations allow us to store large volumes of data in cloud services."
He is currently working on Racetrack memory, which would obsolete flash and hard disks (and probably even RAM).
TFA:
The first use of spin-valve sensors in hard disk drive read heads was in the IBM ® Deskstar 16GP Titan, which was released in late 1997 with 16.8 GB of storage.
1997. That's why I was scratching my head and wondering what radical expansion. In my view, HDDs have expanded on a steady exponential curve in size since ... forever.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hard_drive_capacity_over_time.svg
And they get to offset that cost by running a more efficient operation thanks to higher density disks. Ultimately that also means less hard drives than if they were all using 6.4 GB driver, and less staff to chase them down when they flake out. Not to mention what they save on their power bill. Also, sometime in the last year cloud storage and services stopped being a buzzword and entered reality.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
Without this their main expense wouldn't be bandwidth.
You know, storing vast quantities of stuff on disk was a good starting point, and worthy of recognition.
And then they had to go and mention the cloud and spoil it.
This is why we can't have nice things, because you can't talk about anything without reverting to the latest buzz words.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
I still remember the first computer I encountered with a 1GB hard drive back in 1995.
At the time, with Windows installed the HD was so overwhelmingly empty as to have an echo.
People used to go over and sit at the machine just to bring up a file browser and see the listed free space and go "oooh .... pretty".
Fast forward a few decades, and you can buy and 8GB USB stick in the express checkout at Wal Mart next to the bubble gum (literally).
Every now and then I need to remind people that their smart phone is a computer which is at least a million times faster and with at least a million times more capacity that the first ones I got to use. Because storage was measured in KB, and processor speed was in KHz.
I once joked to a university professor that 1GB of iron core memory would alter Earth's magnetic field beyond belief. Now I can't find many people who know what I mean by iron core memory.
Of course, I had an onion on my belt, which was the style in those days ...
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
I understand how it might be a viable substitute for ram, but I'm not sure if it's persistent like flash storage. Which would make it an abysmal substitute for hard drives.
The first line in the linked wikipedia page says its non-volatile, so it should be persistent.
I know, don't feed... but you're wrong :)
http://www.economist.com/node/...
Brits have some of the healthiest teeth in the world, but it's a different culture here than in the US. In the US, if you're poor, you don't get your teeth done because it's expensive. Here it's free-for-all due to the NHS, but the NHS budget is such that it would be considered a waste to spend taxpayers money on the cosmetic treatments such as the capping and polishing and whitening that are so common in the states. Straightening is normally only done when there's a medical need for it. Obviously, all the same cosmetic treatments are available privately but most people balk at the cost even without the cultural bias - free private dentistry is a perk of my job but still no-one goes for american-style white gnashers.
Haven't had a cavity or anything in fifteen years but by american standards my teeth might well be considered horrible since they're not pearly white (thanks, tea, coffee and fags!); personally, I don't like perfectly even white teeth since to me they look like a horse just jumped out of a toothpaste advert.
Now, if you'd have brought marmite into the conversation you'd have had a point.
Moderation Total: -1 Troll, +3 Goat
The first line of the linked wikipedia article:
Racetrack memory (or domain-wall memory (DWM)) is an experimental non-volatile memory device under development at IBM's Almaden Research Center by a team led by Stuart Parkin
So yes, it's persistent. How persistent is a separate question. Flash memory for example is also classified as non-volatile, but while data won't be immediately lost when power is removed there's a definite unpowered data-retention life - after all those billions of tiny capacitors all have leakage currents - leave them unrefreshed long enough and bye-bye data.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.