Though we rely on them as a mainstay of modern computing, hard drives are really a mixed bag: part storage blessing and part performance albatross. The ongoing digital media revolution could never have gotten off the ground without plentiful, cheap storage, but even so, modern operating systems and programs are typically designed to rely on the hard drive as little as possible. Hard drive access times haven’t kept pace with processor clockspeed increases, so computers increasingly employ sophisticated caching mechanisms (e.g. Intel’s Turbo Memory tech) to minimize the need for a hard drive-based transfer. Now, researchers at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands believe they’ve taken the first step towards solving some of the speed problems of a traditional magnet-based hard drive system.
It must be very difficult doing all that “emonstrating”
The hottest stuff is always just an eternal prototype.
…but not there yet. From the article –
Those are some major obstacles to overcome, not to mention the advances being made in solid state storage. Looks like 3 to 5 years before we see a consumer version.
Looks like laser hard drives will provide higher access speeds and reliability, but much lower data density…
Funny, I always thought that the main limitations on hard-disk data transfer were associated to its spindle speed and head movements (seek times) and not the magnetic writting and reading by itself (I did know that they had limitation but thought they were way insignificant when compared with the former ones). Perhaps, this new technology can improve data density? (This is one of the reasons the new big hard-disk are so much fast than the old ones). Can anyone enlighten these points?
That’s right, this technology does not help one jot the biggest performance problem with hard disks, latency. It takes <100us to write 4K to the platter, yet may take >10000us on average to find the area on the platter, two orders of magnitude longer.
So this advance would improve the 1% of the performance issue.
What are the limitations with building a large solid state based hard drive? I last heard that an Isreali company was marketing one. I would think that following that area of storage technology would be the next logical step.
Anyway, sounds like the laser hard drive technology is some years off.
Price, and size.
Wouldn’t it be more rational and practical to drive all potential to enhancing a solid state drives? I see no benefit of LHHDs as of today. More power needed, less reliable (because of moving parts), more material needed for manufacturing. It’s like putting hi-tech in Model T, hopeing to win Paris-Dakar race.
If they want to work with lasers, holographical HDs are waiting for their hands and minds impatiently.
TFA says that most OSes are pretty much independent of the HD as much as possible. Thats not very funny, at least on W2k there is still a minimum page file and if the HD power connection fails or you hear that sickening power down/up cycle, the OS usually hangs right away. The same is usually true of other OSes I use.
The only rational future of storage is to rely on the next gen Flash with at least 30MB/s transfer rates for all the small files that might be read on a whim by any lazy search but leave all the huge multimedia videos for real HDs since GB size files as very rarely touched and easy to buffer around intermittent power. That solves many problems, much lower latency for file access, much higher transaction rates, much lower power all round and vastly higher reliability as many have already noted.
The issues involved in improving Flash are orders better understood than messing with lasers, that actually seems to be retro. Flash has a few more generations to go and except for media storage can easily satisfy 99% of the market needs. If HDs are reduced to backing up Flash and holding media files, that changes the requirements of HD design itself as well as OS/File system complexity.
In the past we had holographic storage too, the down side of all laser systems is very slow mechanical systems, think CD/DVD ROM drives, very slow even compared to HDs.
So from the article we get that:
Laser HDDs will have lower data density, will require a laser bigger than an ATX case, and will require a kilowatt of power, and it still has moving parts. Hmm, that doesn’t strike me as a technological advance.
Data storage become more reliable and consumes less power when you take moving parts out of the equation. It is likely that solid state storage will become the norm over the next 5 – 10 years, and there will be very little use for kilowatt laser 3 foot hard drives at that point.
I want to see this technology applied to the foreheads of “sharks.” Throw me a frikin’ bone here people.