“Your friend the traditional hard drive may be undergoing changes soon. No, we’re not talking about the threat that flash storage poses to the dominant storage medium, though that’s an emerging player on the scene. No, our favorite plattered friend may be reorienting itself in a literal sense. Perpendicular storage is coming to a computer near you, perhaps sooner than you think. What is it? We’ll break it down for you as Seagate comes to market with the first fruits of a promising technology.” Update: People, you just got to watch the flash animation… It’s… Really, just go see it.
I thought the new technology was about storing bits in straight lines. I wondered how they were going to do that, but the storage capacity gains would seem obvious.
I’ll settle for 30% capacity increase though.
BTW anyone catch that informational flash video? Oh my god, how cheesy yet informative
I don’t think we’ll see the reported 10fold increase any time soon though.
The flash animation is worth the price of admission alone.
Yeah, the flash animation is great. Cult material!
…now if I could only buy one today for my current laptop I’d be happy!
Then again I remember when I bought my current hard drive on my main box – I thought to myself I’d never need more than 80GBs – isn’t it funny how our media software libraries manage to grow in direct porportion to our available hard drive space? I imagine if I were to pick up a nice 300GBs hard drive tommorrow I’d soon discover I need a 600GB disk instead. Anyone remember when it was considered a good quality avi DivX;) file if it was 30 mins at 100MBs? Now you’re lucky to find a quality 30 minute fansub at less than 250mbs!
–bornagainpenguin
No, but I remember when a 20MB HD was considered huge.
And I’m not old, really – I was 9.
lol
it was great
That flash animation is like what… a year old now? The same for Perpendicular Storage, it was loooong known this would come in 2006 (at least that’s what I heard a year ago…)
Yep, I also watched it a few months ago.
Anyway, the flash is crazy!
Temporary solution i also doubt they will get to the 10 times factor anytime soon. Eventually they will either have to go back to 5.25 drive sizes or make holographic storage work.
Re 5.25inch drive size
No, we want higher spin speeds to improve access times. But if disks spin too fast, the outer edges resonate. This really upsets the read/write heads fly height and makes servoing less reliable (which qualifies the read/write functions).
As areal densities improve significantly, disk diameters can shrink enough to work at the next spin speed step.
Alas rising temperatures creates yet more problems.
britbrian
I would think that they would be ok with 5.25 platter size. It would be another temporary fix of course but your probably right. That or they would have to get thicker perhaps add another 2 platters to triple the capacity.
Smartpatrol
5.25 disks & multiple platters are very old world.
HDDs need less disks, smaller dias, less mass/inertia, to spin faster with less power so less heat. Spin speed precision & spin-down/up speeds is continuously adjusted in a digital servo loop.
Multiple platters complicates drives because their tracks & sectors must be extremely coherently aligned thru cylinders comprised by used disk surfaces. Motor bearing wear, shocks, disk clamp loosening, thermals etc can deform the coherency of tracks & sectors thru the cylinder. Miss-aligned disks, degrades head servoing which degrades data read/writes times. It only gets worse as areal densities, ie track & bit densities improve.
In each product generation, the single platter product is the sweet spot and the multiple disk products are marginal and unprofitable in commodity markets.
britbrian
15-18 years ago Byte magazine wrote about the coming vertical recording using cobalt based substrate IIRC.
I was lucky enough to work 5 yrs on disk drive contoller ASICs in late 90s. HDDs use MANY parallel incremental improvements in digital + analog design, firmware, math + codes, electro-mechanical, chemistry, aero dynamics, manufacturing & other disciplines too provide each generations spec improvements.
Vertical recording is not a normal baby step, so it took a while longer to be ready.
I really look forward to storage devics with no moving parts, cool & totally quiet. Wonder what the technology will be ?
britbrian
Uhm… I don’t know what to say about that… cult material indeed!
Can’t stand them.
Loud,break down, slow and suck power.
Sucks that holographic drives haven’t happened yet.
Needed them along time ago.
Flash will be good.
Any word on the read/write speeds or the access times. Space is not an issue to me but the speed is a huge issue as I deal with a lot of very large files because I create and edit a lot of video.
If these are capable of running 20-30% faster I’ll spend the extra money to get 2 of them as soon as they hit the market and raid the drives.
Can I buy this music for my iPod? 😉
I think I may have seen that animation before. Either that or somewhere in the distant past, “Schoolhouse Rock” managed to go on a drugged-out time-travel trip to my past…
When did we get to /b/? Seriously? Given Hitachi drives are usually rinky unreliable crap anyways, I wouldn’t hold my breath on seeing this on shelves any time in the next decade. This ranks up there with ‘head per track’, ‘optical tracking’ and ‘quantum storage’…
Oh, and re_re has it right; these limp wristed {censored} complaining about hard drives being ‘loud’ in this day and age SERIOUSLY need to get bent. Half the damned machines out there today already are so quiet that when I turn them on I think they are broken.
There are certain little namby pamby sissy boys need to spend some time next to a Bernouli box or 5 meg Winchesters.
Sorry, pet peeve.
Edited 2006-01-18 14:58