10+ Gig Removables?

swegerm writes "Well, if you think you're impressed with the nano magnetics at Cornell - which is years off - then you'll be even more impressed with the technology that is here now called "Near Field Recording". The company TeraStor has developed storage technology that starts at 10 Gig removable on a 5.25 single sided platter for $700-800 dollars. This will be similar to a CD or Zip drive. The starting areal density is 10 Giga bits/sq. inch and approach by the year 2001, 100 Giga bits/sq. inch. The theoretical maximum is 100,000 Giga bits/sq. inch. It is based on a combination of optics and magnetic media with the key solution being in the read/write head. It's supposed to even exceed GMR technology from IBM. "

Comments

I have this technology available today!

[jerodd]

It's some thingie made by Seagate. It's rather simple to plug in: there is a slot in front of my computer where I slide the thing in and make sure the cables are slotted firmly (for maximal reliability, it interfaces with the host eletrically instead of mechanically). It has around 10GB of space and very fast access times--less than four milliseconds.

Each cartridge costs about $300 each new, but are available for much less from eBay (I recently got two of them for $150 each, including shipping and handling fee).

Best of all, no new driver support is needed--simply unmount the disk, power it off with hdparm(8), remove it, and take it with me.

It ways a 1/2 kilo, not much more than a Jaz disk, and holes twice as much. It uses the standard IDE interface, although SCSI models are also available.

No special controller cards are needed: it appears a standard ATAPI DISK or SCSI FIXED device to your IDE or SCSI controller.

I am, of course, talking about 10GB fixed disk, as I've been using since my first date with my PCjx's 10MB sidecar.

Cheers,
Joshua.

The one time I didn't hit preview...

[jerodd]

Arggh. s/ways/weighs/g\ns/holes/holds/g.

Really cool stuff...

[Anonymous Shepherd]

Reading through the article, it sounds like their Evanescent Coupling technique is a direct application of quantum tunneling, though the term and effect is more often discussed with electrons and discontinuous barriers, ie electrons tunneling through a barrier. Perhaps I don't have this right, any physics majors willing to correct me?

It would seem even without the increase in areal density observed, the techniques involved with flying heads and SIL/Evanescent Coupling would revolutionize removeable media, allowing the speed lower latency of current Winchester media and the durability and reliability of MO media.

I'm not sure myself why crescent shaped domains would aide and increase the areal density; is there some sort of implied overlap between data regions? Is it just a function of tighter packing? Or just smaller domains because of SIL and tighter laser focus/embedded magnetic coils in the flying head?

Why wouldn't this be applicable to current magnetic hard drives then? Because magnetic forces cannot be shaped or focused in a way that optical beams can?

AS

The big deal is...

[Anonymous Shepherd]

Magneto-resistive drives are highly suseptible to outside magnetic influence, so the use of optical writing methods help protect the data.

Current magneto-optical devices are slow because of the head technology, and have relatively low density because of the size of the spot and magnetic domains.

Combining the two allows for the stability of optical data and the density of magnetic storage methods...

Unless you're being sarcastic, you're tape drive won't be of much use for large amounts of data needed to be accessed quickly...

AS