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100x Faster Hard Drive In Lab
Posted by
kdawson
on Sat Jun 30, 2007 01:02 PM
from the lasers-and-gadolinium dept.
from the lasers-and-gadolinium dept.
Gary lets us know about research out of the Netherlands that has succeeded in reading and writing a hard disk using polarized laser light. The researchers claim this offers a 100-times speedup over reading/writing using magnets. People have been trying for years to write data using polarized light; the secret of the current work's success lies in its disk's materials — gadolinium, iron, and cobalt. Working prototype drives should be available within a decade.
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A decade? (Score:2, Insightful)
Spare me. I've been hearing about incredibly dense optical storage for thirty years now. I have yet to see it.
Re:A decade? (Score:5, Insightful)
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I bet 70's punch card jockeys would have deemed DVD quite something.
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I think the article is about magnetic storage.
So, same drive, but a new way of writing/reading it.
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Why is this modded insightful? TFA refers neither to data density nor optical storage.
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Huge reliable solid state storage will have taken over by then. Samsung has 32GB SSDs now.
( http://www.samsung.com/PressCenter/PressRelease/Pr essRelease.asp?seq=20060523_0000257520 [samsung.com] )
Latency is very low, and R/W throughput will increase along with capacity. optical / holographic storage is like ceramics, its always the "future."
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Re:A decade? (Score:4, Interesting)
1 TB Hard Drive [newegg.com]
I'm sitting next to two computers right now, both running Ubuntu. One was purchased in 1996, the other's hard drives were purchased three years ago. The one from 1996 has a 16 GB hard drive, which, as I recall, was the biggest Gateway offered at the time. The other has four 320 GB drives on a RAID 5 (960 GB/894 GiB), which, as I recall, was the second largest behind the 500 GB drives at the time. 30 times larger in about 8 years.
Perhaps you've heard of perpindicular recording [wikipedia.org], which started early last year. Pretty soon it's going to be impossible to get a hard drive that doesn't have this new technology. You can easily argue that the technology can't go anywhere after this, but it does offer a 10x storage density increase, and you know somebody will be cramming more data blocks on a platter soon enough.
You see, the great thing about hard drives is that they're not critical to the operation of your computer. My Myth frontend has a 40 GB hard drive. The backend, located in a different room and accessed through the network, has 8 500 GB drives on a RAID 5. With the ever-increasing speed of networks, putting things somewhere else is getting easier every day. Sun has taken this idea to the next level with Project Blackbox [sun.com]. Another great thing is that if you need more space, it's fairly easy to just add another drive to your contraption - something you really can't do with processor speed or memory (to a certain point - 4 GB per stick is the highest I've seen).
I see your point - we don't want a datacenter in the basement of every home, but we don't NEED a better system of information storage NOW. There are a lot of ideas out there; most will fall through, but we'll get one, eventually, and that one will make all the difference in the world.
Parent
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Blasphemy. No mention of perpendicular recording is complete with out a link to this. [hitachigst.com]
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Personally, I've remained unimpressed by current technologies for "faster" drives. For example, look at these benchmarks [tomshardware.com] of Hitachi's 1 TB solution, compared with many other drives. The only significant difference between the 1 TB and the 15K raptor is the access latency time, which is half as much in the Raptor. However, just like in physical memory, latency doesn't seem to matter at all, as you can see in the benchmarks of file reading and writing, system bootup times and all the other benchm
Re:A decade? (Score:4, Interesting)
You must be joking - in fact I was tempted to mod you funny instead of posting. Just about all of my customers, family and friends would love their computers to be even faster, but 80% of them aren't even using 20% of their drives. And not a one of the latter group has balked at the price of an external HD, to say nothing of DVD burning options.
In the mean time, I would still like to play Oblivion faster, and one of the simulations I'm writing is hell on the processor. Data storage, on the other hand, is plentiful, though more RAM or some equivalent would indeed be nice.
Parent
Do we even have to say it? (Score:3, Insightful)
Seriously, I can't think of an otherwise plausible tech that's been vaporware longer than light- or holography-based data storage. I know there have been working examples for years, and I think there's even a (really, really expensive, very specialized) production version or two, but come on! How hard can this be?
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Re:Do we even have to say it? (Score:5, Funny)
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Hard Disk? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Hard Disk? (Score:4, Interesting)
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Probably not in the notebook/desktop consumer market, but I can imagine enterprise/research uses for magnetic HDDs where read/write times are less important and $/GB much more so.
That said, if I'm right, laser-based magnetic storage being faster than current tech won't really matter for that kind of scenario.
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Flash is also not a stable read/write medium... write the same sector a couple thousand times, and you won't have a sector anymore.
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The problem is that the readers are now $700. When it gets to under $99-$199, it will take off. People, being as mobile as they are today, don't want libraries at home anymore that takes shelves upon shelves away. Plus it would be nice to be able to carry your library with you.
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Um. False. There may be fewer people, but there remains sizable number who do, in fact, want libraries at home. Something about books, and having lots of them, is very appealing to some people. I don't know of any other form of entertainment where people develop the type of feeling they do when it comes to a book they've read a time or three -- the actual, physical book.
link... (Score:4, Informative)
the really fascinating thing is not THAT they succeeded to change the magnet field via lasers, it's the speed if you compare their figures to this [newscientist.com]
Faster how? (Score:3, Interesting)
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Hard disk speed comes from several factors:
Data density: The more densely it's packed, the more data per second passes under the head
Rotational speed: The faster it spins, the more data per second passes under the head
Latency, a combination between the seek latency (how long it takes the disk assembly to move to the location), and rotational latency (how long it takes for the platter to rotate to the required position), determines how long it will will take the disk to start reading data from some
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Are they making a hard disk with an optical head?
Yes. Or at least they are to my interpretation of using a laser to write to the disk. You can be pedantic if you wish but they haven't claimed something that they haven't done.
And no-one is arguing with any of your other points, which I guess is why they reckon it will take a decade to come up with a workable, deployable solution. Perhaps they are being optimistic but, hey, who knows? The world is full of things that once looked impossible but are now taken for granted. The clever part is that the
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Well, that's just the thing that makes me wonder if there's any point in going in this direction. Spinning that much faster would require some really good bearings and a platter made of unobtainium (IIRC, at the current speeds, the forces trying to shatter the platter are quite significant already).
Besides, it seems that the new way of doing this is with Flash or something similar. I wouldn't be surprised if that's what we'll have everywhere 10 years from now. No seek latency, you can get more speed by i
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Stupid hype (Score:4, Insightful)
On the other hand is the switching of magnetic domains by the polarity of a circular pulse an archivement in itself. But of course fundamental research doesnt interest anybody, so they have to create a stupid "next storage medium" out of it.
No, it isn't really 100x faster (Score:5, Insightful)
That optimizes a tiny part of the problem. There are two mechanical issues, 1) waiting for the right part of the disk to rotate under the read/write head, and 2) arm motion. Without eliminating one or both of these delays, I don't see how this leads to faster secondary storage access in practice.
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Those delays may be a bit inconvenient, but they are not a major problem. For more than a decade, we have more or less known how to deal with them. Yes, a bit of research is still happening in this area, mainly for two reasons. We want to do things with disks that we didn't always do, such as virtual memory. The other reason is, that as CPU spees have grown faster than disk speeds, the
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I suspect a lot of that can be attributed to the market demand, rather than an actual technological limit. The size of the hard-drive is it's main metric, and the only thing that consumers look at, and of course the engineers will make a compromise size/speed/price.
At the end of the day, what would you rather have:
arm motion? (Score:2)
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The cool thing about lasers is that the data can be transmitted through the air/vacuum and is not reliant on quasi-physical contact of the reading/writing head; so while the old "arm over spinning disk" mig
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Reverse the polarity of the tachyon pulse! (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, this is great, but.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Hard drives have gotten bigger, and bigger, and *BIGGER* over the last 20-30 years. But they don't *FEEL* that much faster. They've become wonders at streaming huge blobs of contiguous data out - so why do databases need huge steaming bloody chunks of RAM cache? Because the random access times *SUCK* and really haven't gotten that much better!
Capacity has gone from 5MB to 1TB, but spindle speeds have gone from 3600RPM - up to a max of??? 15K RPM for some really expensive drives? Track-to-Track seek hasn't gone up much. Neither has real nor manufacture's claimed throughput rates.
RAM hasn't nearly kept up with CPUs, either, but the disparity is nothing compared to the hold you get when you have to go after some data from the hard drive that isn't in the cache.
It's so bad, I strongly considered putting 3 4GB FLASH modules with IDE adapters (RAID5 - but I didn't study this to see if 2 8GB with RAID1 might be better, or other variations) into my new machine on the PATA header to act as the root drive, holding everything but
Sequential read speed is kinda nice, but I *do* need to do random accesses sometimes! I listen to my nice little 2TB RAID array all the time, as the heads move back and forth singing their little song.
Bah HD speed (Score:3, Insightful)
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Inside a hard disk it's pretty cramped already. Adding extra voice coils, arm assemblies, etc. is complicated, adds extra heat output, and increases the probability of a failure. A multihead drive would probably cost more than two normal ones and not have much of an edge performance-wise.
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"I have always wondered why drives couldn't be configured with two independent arm assemblies"
They can, it's just not worth it; it's a lot of additional expense and complexity (and thus reduced MTBF) all for a very low volume part, when most people would prefer you to just make a physically smaller, cheaper disk so they can get more of them when needed.
Read-write on all platters at once isn't really feasable because the tracks aren't going to line up reliably; leaving aside imperfect manufacturing, components aren't all going to see uniform levels of thermal expansion or vibration, and even microsc
Ten Years (Score:4, Funny)
Where's my flying car? (Score:3, Insightful)
how noisy is it? (Score:2)
Where does it say that they were able to READ? (Score:2)