Nope - just make the chips small enough such they can sit on a flex circuit and tolerate the needed bend radius. I do this all the time with ultra small medical electronics. Or put the silicon someplace that does not have to bend. This is totally a no brainer.
No difference between enterprise and home HDD's that I know of.
As for what "hammering and heavy use " of a drive is?
The biggest killer of HDD's is something called the CSS test cycle.
CSS = Contact Start Stop where the drive is booted up, spun up, and then shut down repetitively.
Generally, a HDD sitting there spinning away is not what kill them off, however turning them on-off-on-off a lot is the most abusive thing that you can do.
I still think WD makes the best quality out there, but that's just my opinion.
Already been done between boards, for sure. Limitations of copper connections on PCB is at roughly 20GB/s - although there are arguments above or below that, that is what I have been able to get up to with some heroic measures. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_(supercomputer)
Optical connections across boards has been done some but its generally not seriously explored due to the overhead associated with getting in-out of optical medium, people tend to just use copper and put more parallel paths in.
Optical inside the chips? Not there yet, something should emerge in quantum computers before we are all dead, right?
Although the boards can become effective adsorbents, he says the method for making the materials may not be as energy efficient and cost effective as for other adsorbents, such as granular ferric hydroxide, because of all the processing steps needed to produce the treated powder.
Most MPP machines that I am familiar with have a system where the status and functionality of all nodes is checked as part of a supervisory routine and mapped out of the system. Bad Node? It goes on the list for somebody to go out and hot swap out the device. Processing load gets swapped to another machine.
Once the new device is in place that same routine brings that now functioning processor back into the system.
That sort of thing has existed for at least 10 years and probably longer.
Whats being described sounds common to the transmitter power. Just guessing - but I would say that the RF power transistors in the PA are slowly losing efficiency.
Could not find any burn in data for GaAs power transistors, but its a possibility.
Yeah, reconfigurable electronics exists in many forms. Whats unique and different here? Can't see anything without some specifics of what they got. Reclaims of reconfigurable analog circuits? Analog circuits and systems tend to be niche and dedicated (RF front ends, power systems, ADC & DAC's) and the reconfigurables tend to be in the digital core of the system. But then isn't that what we got SW for?
This is no big deal. What they are talking about here is the additive cycles in a day and not worrying about the compensation process for that.
Some basics:
Anything connected to the 60Hz power is at 60HZ, You can not connect a 61Hz generator to the grid. In addition, when you connect a generator to the grid, you have to adjust its phase, as you bring it on line. If the phase angle does not line up you get you get into a "tug of war" between multiple generation sources and that doesn't work.
The sine wave coming out of one generator has to line up with the other sine waves from the other sine waves from the other generators.
60 cycles/sec X 60 sec/min X 60 mins/hour X 24 hours/day = 5.184E6 cycle/day
What the article is talking about is the adjustment of the generating stations on the grid so that at the end of the day you get that exact number of cycles across the grid, not one more not one less. It is "really close" without tweaking but not exact.
It costs money to do those tweaks, to get the numbers on the money. That tweak right now really doesn't serve much purpose anymore.
Noting exciting, or interesting here, this is not Y2K nonsense, move along...
"most cheap consumer shit monitors the speed of at least the CPU fan and tends to freak out if a fan that is supposed to be there is either absent or performing substantially below expected speed"
Got it backwards - Since the Pentium 1, there has been thermal monitor diodes inside the CPU to monitor the silicon temperature. Fan speed was dialed up-down as a function of the temperature.
Cooling using fluid has been around for many years, This is so 1985.
Immersion of HDD? Thats a quick crash and burn. Except for specialty devices they are open to acquire external same air pressure, thru a sub-micron filter, yes! HDD are not the primary source of heat in a computer however.
"Seriously, how much "design" goes into a technology that has been around for 30+ years. You take a platter, mount it on a spindle, spin it, send the data through the same IO standard that has been around for 10 years. What f*cking design is involved? Hard drives ARE obsolete, they do not become obsolete after 3 - 6 months of design. If I open a hard drive in 2011, it looks exactly the same as one in 1990."
LOL! If I open up a microprocessor from 1985 it looks a lot like a microprocessor from 2011! Funny thing, one works with a 20MHz clock and the other one works with a 2.5GHz clock. Do you want me to itemize all the other differences as well?
Lets see the list is huge, heres some reading for you: http://www.disktrend.com/pdf/portrpkg.pdf Thats from the perspective of the box, not what goes on inside of it.
The list of things in servo mechanisms, ECC methods, magnetic media, read channels, spindle controls, embedded servo methods, read/write heads, plated recording media, Viterbi detection vs peak detection, signal processing, PRML channels, etc, etc are huge.
Well, I would say that you are not in semiconductors or magnetic storage. A minor correction - the HDD is the fastest mechanical part of the computer. ====> mechanical========
Thing is - a SSD is limited by semiconductor density and the physics thereof. FYI -- the transistor right now sits at 13 atoms of silicon in length -- the transistor right now has gate oxide thicknesses of 4 molecules of oxide
Shrinking transistors using fractional atoms and molecules are not going to happen.
Consequently, without some breakthrus in transistor technology getting higher densities is going to not make great leaps. Some incremental improvements are still happening, but until that breakthru happens, you are not going to have any miracles.
If somebody saw a new way to make storage reliable, fast, and cheap, they would be all over it. If you come up with a SSD that can beat the HDD in volume/speed/cost/reliability you can get very rich very quick.
The HDD death has been predicted a few too many times...
Its still the cheapest storage with easy access out there.
Consolidation is not only expected, but somewhat necessary. I spent 15 years in the HDD industry, and some things to understand:
- It takes roughly 70 people and 6-9 months to design and develop a new disk drive. - product lifetime has been as short as 2 months and as long as 1 year. - typical product lifetime is 3-6 months. - A company needs to have multiple design teams doing multiple product designs phased for phased product releases. If the product is late, its already obolete, and will not sell. If the product is slightly behind the times, it will not sell.
Because of the above NRE expenses are huge, so margins or volumes have got to be huge, to make any money. Margins went to nothing many years back, so the volumes need to be huge. Thus fewer players are the results of all that.
Because of the above, dozens of companies that used to make disk drives are now long gone.
All of that said, the "death of the HDD has been greatly exaggerated" - its cheap, high volume storage, and all in all "fairly" reliable.
Instead of the fancy electronic gadgetry how about:
Food supply issues Potable water Sewage methods Medical needs
When you get that taken care of then: Electricity STD needs Year round housing Basic education
Blinky light toys and internet access are generally pretty far down the priority list IMHO.
When everyone is housed, fed, disease is under control, and aren't worrying about how you are going to live for the next 24 hours Then you can start worrying about internet access.
Volunteer for the Peace Corp, Doctors without borders, or similar and you will get a better idea of whats important.
You have to have a double track system end to end - the San Diego to LA has many places where it is single track. Compounding the problem, much of that track goes though coastal CA along the beach. Nobody wants to improve the track there if its in your backyard.
The Boston to Washington DC rails has a similar problem. They got high speed trains, but a large portion of the tracks do not allow the trains to go at full speed.
Actually radiation hardened designs are only done for older architecture processors in many cases.
The path of a highly energized ion leaves a path thru a semiconductor that remains conductive briefly. Can mess up memory, and logic stuff in a big ugly way.
Wow... A lot of this is missing the main issue that has now limited the speed of processors for a number of years - Limitations of the interconnect.
The average microprocessor is not limited by the capability of the transistor, but rather the RC time constants associated with the connections between them.
Thats the reason, aluminum as a metal interconnect was dropped a while back in favor of copper. Lower R for the same C.
If you want best signal quality you will have a high gain dish antenna with an auto alignment system to keep it aligned with the tower antenna and get the best SNR performance.
That's going to be a bit bulky and awkward to deal with however.
ALL cell phone antennas are a compromise on usability, compactness signal strength in transmission, sensitivity to orientation and sensitivity to close proximity loading (the big sweaty hand syndrome)
And a dozen other things.
The average end user doesn't notice and they don't care until it affects what they are doing.
Apple Screwed Up - and Jobs doesn't want to show humility. Old Jobs from 20 years back. Pretty typical for him.
In San Jose, there is a street named for Steve Wozniak (Woz Way downtown) Nothing there for Steve Jobs. Woz is well liked by the engineers in Silly Valley - Not so for SJ...
Slashdot Mirror
Nope - just make the chips small enough such they can sit on a flex circuit and tolerate the needed bend radius. I do this all the time with ultra small medical electronics. Or put the silicon someplace that does not have to bend. This is totally a no brainer.
Totally useless, you can build flexible and stretchable interconnects and displays, the transistors themselves have no real need to stretch.
Probably the power drive electronics. 10K spindle speed issues are a PITA in the reliability department.
So I don't know when you used to design HDD's but you are talking rubbish.
not talking 2.5 drives - also the dual port devices are just the electronics and not the actual HDA
historically 2.5 drives are not as cost effective as 3.5 due to the majority were built with 5V only electronics.
my information is a bit out of date, I got out of drives when I moved out of the bay area.
Rubbish?
Eh, WD and Seagate still hit me up to come drink the Koolaid but I am not going back to N CA
The test array systems had 128 drives per bay and 8 racks of that.
That was the US system, the high volume beatup happened in Singapore back then.
No difference between enterprise and home HDD's that I know of.
As for what "hammering and heavy use " of a drive is?
The biggest killer of HDD's is something called the CSS test cycle.
CSS = Contact Start Stop where the drive is booted up, spun up, and then shut down repetitively.
Generally, a HDD sitting there spinning away is not what kill them off,
however turning them on-off-on-off a lot is the most abusive thing that you can do.
I still think WD makes the best quality out there, but that's just my opinion.
just my 0.02 worth...
Already been done between boards, for sure. Limitations of copper connections on PCB is at roughly 20GB/s - although there are arguments above or below that, that is what I have been able to get up to with some heroic measures.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_(supercomputer)
Optical connections across boards has been done some but its generally not seriously explored due to the overhead associated with getting in-out of optical medium, people tend to just use copper and put more parallel paths in.
Optical inside the chips? Not there yet, something should emerge in quantum computers before we are all dead, right?
http://electronicdesign.com/digital-ics/tiny-transistors-giant-molecules-moore-s-law-crashes-laws-physics
Give this a read.
Moore's law extrapolations are hitting the limitations of physics.
As for shrinking transistors?
Pretty meaningless, silicon hit the limitations of the interconnects a while back.
Parasitic capacitance has been the brick wall that people can not get past.
From the article:
Although the boards can become effective adsorbents, he says the method for making the materials may not be as energy efficient and cost effective as for other adsorbents, such as granular ferric hydroxide, because of all the processing steps needed to produce the treated powder.
Conclusion - its dead before its even starts.
Most MPP machines that I am familiar with have a system where the status and functionality of all nodes is checked as part of a supervisory routine and mapped out of the system. Bad Node? It goes on the list for somebody to go out and hot swap out the device. Processing load gets swapped to another machine.
Once the new device is in place that same routine brings that now functioning processor back into the system.
That sort of thing has existed for at least 10 years and probably longer.
Nobody has ever used a Solar Oven before?
http://www.amazon.com/Sun-Oven-GLOBAL-SUN-OVEN/dp/B00286KQ1W
Might need 2 days to get it done.
Whats being described sounds common to the transmitter power.
Just guessing - but I would say that the RF power transistors in the PA
are slowly losing efficiency.
Could not find any burn in data for GaAs power transistors, but its a possibility.
Good grief - looks to me like somebody trying to re-write history.
Look at:
http://www.vashiva.com/inventing_email.asp
Got his own web site pumping himself.
Then:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shiva_Ayyadurai
A wiki page that many have said needs to be deleted.
I wonder who wrote that little work?
Maybe Big Brother can get him a job
working for the Thought Police!
Yeah, reconfigurable electronics exists in many forms.
Whats unique and different here?
Can't see anything without some specifics of what they got.
Reclaims of reconfigurable analog circuits?
Analog circuits and systems tend to be niche and dedicated
(RF front ends, power systems, ADC & DAC's)
and the reconfigurables tend to be in the digital core of the system.
But then isn't that what we got SW for?
This is no big deal. What they are talking about here is the additive cycles in a day and not worrying about the compensation process for that.
Some basics:
Anything connected to the 60Hz power is at 60HZ, You can not connect a 61Hz generator to the grid.
In addition, when you connect a generator to the grid, you have to adjust its phase, as you bring it on line.
If the phase angle does not line up you get you get into a "tug of war" between multiple generation sources and that doesn't work.
The sine wave coming out of one generator has to line up with the other sine waves from the other sine waves from the other generators.
60 cycles/sec X 60 sec/min X 60 mins/hour X 24 hours/day = 5.184E6 cycle/day
What the article is talking about is the adjustment of the generating stations on the grid so that at the end of the day you get that exact number of cycles across the grid, not one more not one less. It is "really close" without tweaking but not exact.
It costs money to do those tweaks, to get the numbers on the money. That tweak right now really doesn't serve much purpose anymore.
Noting exciting, or interesting here, this is not Y2K nonsense, move along...
"most cheap consumer shit monitors the speed of at least the CPU fan and tends to freak out if a fan that is supposed to be there is either absent or performing substantially below expected speed"
Got it backwards - Since the Pentium 1, there has been thermal monitor diodes inside the CPU to monitor the silicon temperature. Fan speed was dialed up-down as a function of the temperature.
Cooling using fluid has been around for many years, This is so 1985.
Immersion of HDD? Thats a quick crash and burn. Except for specialty devices they are open to acquire external same air pressure, thru a sub-micron filter, yes! HDD are not the primary source of heat in a computer however.
I hope you are joking.
The 1GB drive was "the hot new thing" in 1993.
And that was a full size 3.5 " platter desktop HDD
2000X increase in storage density in 20 years.
If you are serious, then I can sugggest a course or two
at either UCSD's CMRR or Santa Clara University's magentic recording research programs.
"Seriously, how much "design" goes into a technology that has been around for 30+ years. You take a platter, mount it on a spindle, spin it, send the data through the same IO standard that has been around for 10 years. What f*cking design is involved? Hard drives ARE obsolete, they do not become obsolete after 3 - 6 months of design. If I open a hard drive in 2011, it looks exactly the same as one in 1990."
LOL! If I open up a microprocessor from 1985 it looks a lot like a microprocessor from 2011!
Funny thing, one works with a 20MHz clock and the other one works with a 2.5GHz clock. Do you want me to itemize all the other differences as well?
Lets see the list is huge, heres some reading for you:
http://www.disktrend.com/pdf/portrpkg.pdf
Thats from the perspective of the box, not what goes on inside of it.
Recording head technology:
http://www.soe.ucsc.edu/classes/cmps129/Winter03/papers/grochowski-trends.pdf
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disk_read-and-write_head
Vertical recording:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpendicular_recording
Read channel technology:
http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4169625/Hard-disk-drive-read-channels--a-must-for-perpendicular-recording
The list of things in servo mechanisms, ECC methods, magnetic media, read channels, spindle controls, embedded servo methods, read/write heads, plated recording media, Viterbi detection vs peak detection, signal processing, PRML channels, etc, etc are huge.
Well, I would say that you are not in semiconductors or magnetic storage.
A minor correction - the HDD is the fastest mechanical part of the computer.
====> mechanical========
Thing is - a SSD is limited by semiconductor density and the physics thereof.
FYI
-- the transistor right now sits at 13 atoms of silicon in length
-- the transistor right now has gate oxide thicknesses of 4 molecules of oxide
Shrinking transistors using fractional atoms and molecules are not going to happen.
Consequently, without some breakthrus in transistor technology getting higher densities
is going to not make great leaps. Some incremental improvements are still happening, but
until that breakthru happens, you are not going to have any miracles.
If somebody saw a new way to make storage reliable, fast, and cheap, they would be all over it.
If you come up with a SSD that can beat the HDD in volume/speed/cost/reliability you can get very rich very quick.
The HDD death has been predicted a few too many times...
Its still the cheapest storage with easy access out there.
Consolidation is not only expected, but somewhat necessary.
I spent 15 years in the HDD industry, and some things to understand:
- It takes roughly 70 people and 6-9 months to design and develop a new disk drive.
- product lifetime has been as short as 2 months and as long as 1 year.
- typical product lifetime is 3-6 months.
- A company needs to have multiple design teams doing multiple product designs phased for phased product releases.
If the product is late, its already obolete, and will not sell.
If the product is slightly behind the times, it will not sell.
Because of the above NRE expenses are huge, so margins or volumes have got to be huge, to make any money.
Margins went to nothing many years back, so the volumes need to be huge. Thus fewer players are the results of all that.
Because of the above, dozens of companies that used to make disk drives are now long gone.
All of that said, the "death of the HDD has been greatly exaggerated"
- its cheap, high volume storage, and all in all "fairly" reliable.
Instead of the fancy electronic gadgetry how about:
Food supply issues
Potable water
Sewage methods
Medical needs
When you get that taken care of then:
Electricity
STD needs
Year round housing
Basic education
Blinky light toys and internet access
are generally pretty far down the priority list IMHO.
When everyone is housed, fed, disease is under control, and
aren't worrying about how you are going to live for the next 24 hours
Then you can start worrying about internet access.
Volunteer for the Peace Corp, Doctors without borders, or similar
and you will get a better idea of whats important.
You have to have a double track system end to end - the San Diego to LA has many places where it is single track. Compounding the problem, much of that track goes though coastal CA along the beach. Nobody wants to improve the track there if its in your backyard.
The Boston to Washington DC rails has a similar problem. They got high speed trains, but a large portion of the tracks do not allow the trains to go at full speed.
Actually radiation hardened designs are only done for older architecture processors in many cases.
The path of a highly energized ion leaves a path thru a semiconductor that remains conductive briefly. Can mess up memory, and logic stuff in a big ugly way.
Wow... A lot of this is missing the main issue that has now limited the speed of processors for a number of years - Limitations of the interconnect.
The average microprocessor is not limited by the capability of the transistor, but rather the RC time constants associated with the connections between them.
Thats the reason, aluminum as a metal interconnect was dropped a while back in favor of copper. Lower R for the same C.
Analog computing? good luck with that!
If you want best signal quality you will have a high gain
dish antenna with an auto alignment system to keep
it aligned with the tower antenna and get the best SNR
performance.
That's going to be a bit bulky and awkward to deal with however.
ALL cell phone antennas are a compromise on usability, compactness
signal strength in transmission, sensitivity to orientation and sensitivity to
close proximity loading (the big sweaty hand syndrome)
And a dozen other things.
The average end user doesn't notice and they don't care until it
affects what they are doing.
Apple Screwed Up - and Jobs doesn't want to show humility.
Old Jobs from 20 years back. Pretty typical for him.
In San Jose, there is a street named for Steve Wozniak (Woz Way downtown)
Nothing there for Steve Jobs.
Woz is well liked by the engineers in Silly Valley - Not so for SJ...