Toshiba Boosts Hard Drive Density By 50% 129
An anonymous reader writes "Toshiba has unveiled a ground-breaking technology that boosts recording density by 50% on an 80-GB, 1.8", single-platter drive. Using what it calls Discrete Track Recording technology, Toshiba was able to pack 120 GB storage on a single 1.8" platter. The new development will hugely benefit media player, UMPC, and ultra-portable laptop segments where 1.8" drives with maximum possible capacity are in great demand."
well... (Score:1, Interesting)
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Re:well... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Multiple read-head drives (Score:2)
IIRC, it's not as effective as you might think it would be at first glance. Although it does help some workloads (ones that are seek-limited), I don't think the improvements were en
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From TFA : "The DTR "groove" forming process is most easily applied to small form factor HDDs, such as 1.8 inch and 2.5 inch drives."
whenever they talk about hard drive densitiy (Score:4, Funny)
George McFly: Lorraine, my density has bought me to you.
Lorraine Baines: What?
George McFly: Oh, what I meant to say was...
Lorraine Baines: Wait a minute, don't I know you from somewhere?
George McFly: Yes. Yes. I'm George, George McFly. I'm your density.
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The obligatory reference for HD density stories is Perpendicular [hitachigst.com]
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Prolonging a dying technology (Score:1, Funny)
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Damnit... (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Damnit... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Damnit... (Score:4, Interesting)
I've been waiting for well over 10 years. When I first thought that SSD was going to "win", 1 GB drive was huge. Now, it's $9, plugs into a thumb-sized slot in 5 seconds, and is available at the local Wal-Mart. The mechanical drives sport 750 GB for $200 that the 1 GB drive used to cost. (and that doesn't even account for inflation!)
I have a digital camera with video and sound. It's up to 800x600, and with my 2 GB flash cartridge, I get up to about an 30 minutes of video. It's very small, lightweight, and runs on a couple AA rechargables.
Still think that SSD hasn't "won"?
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What was that? Don't think $10 is expensive? That's $10 a gigabyte, right? For $185, we get 750GB, which works out to be $0.24 a gigabyte.
And that's why mechanical hard drives remain king.
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I wouldn't bet on that. At some point, no moving parts has to beat moving parts.
Yeah, like how the Peltier cooler has replaced mechanical refrigerators. Or the thermocouple has replaced mechanical generators and steam in nuclear power plants.
Oh, wait....
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Personally I think it's much more likely, at least initially, that they'll go the hybrid route. So you'll have say 10GB of SS and 1TB of "traditional" drive. But then it's also not obvious at the moment when the market will stop caring about larger amounts of storage, for instance it's possible that if they could do a cheap 20-40GB SSD that would work at the low end.
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Yeah that is what I'm beting when I read Slashdot
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yes spinning disks suck, but 100x the cost sucks even MORE. SSD is up there with those holographic drives we keep hearing about that are only 2 years away...
Re:Damnit... (Score:5, Insightful)
The other trend I see is satisfaction with hard drive sizes. Notice how the blurb for this article only mentioned 1.8" platters, as if capacity was only lacking in small devices? For most people, requirements for storage simply aren't growing. Even Vista is insignificant on a cheap, commonplace 500 GB drive. My PVR PC still has a 160 GB drive, I just can't be bothered to upgrade.
With near 0 access latency and higher reliability, flash doesn't have to beat winchester drives in $$/GB to win. It just has to be big enough and cheap enough, and it's getting there.
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For my OS, flash seems a very logical choice. Price and some uncertainties about the flash currently on the market have withhold me from buying it so far, but this will
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I don't know which "new applications" you're talking about, but I don
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Granted, it will have to come down in price by a factor of 100 for me to consider
buying it and I am in a science lab with serious funding.
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How can you even compare the two? Solid State Drives [newegg.com] are already on the market. Sure it's expensive, but it's actually on the market, unlike holographic storage.
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One thing confuses me about SSD (Score:2)
They're solid state. To me that means that every bit is as close as every other, near enough.
It should be possible to deliver far more bandwidth from an SSD than through magnetic media.
But the best claims I've seen for SSD are about 10MB/sec.
Where's my pen drive that's capable of 480Mbps? Where's the SATA attached SSD capable of 3Gbps?
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SSD will likely never be the clear winner when we're talking about large storage. Just like HDD didn't replace magnetic tapes for backup in companies, because of their lower capacity and reliability.
You can expect SSD to make a boom (already is anyway) in mobile devices, and HDD's will become all hybrid: with 10-20 GB of SSD and a spinning disk to fill-in the capacity up to say 300-400 GB.
This way, you get the best of both worlds. Your startup and
Technological anachronism (Score:3, Funny)
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Most likely, all of the possible 1e10 U.S. phone numbers would be encoded as individual nanoscale holes around the dial. You could dial anybody in the country with just a single flip of the wrist.
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Freakin' awesome (Score:2)
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Yeah.
another infomercial (Score:4, Informative)
2. The Toshiba 120 Gb drive, according to PC Watch Impress (http://pc.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/2007/0906/tos
I'd guess the new iPod Classic uses the Toshiba drive, since it supposedly uses even less power compared to their previous 1.8" drives. But if this is the case, it means I can't just rip it out of the iPod to plug into my laptop, since the interface doesn't appear to be compatible with their previous 1.8" drives.
However, I still hope that at least one of these make it to the retail market. It would be nice to be able to double my current 80 Gb drive.
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Thanks, I'd be sure to pass that onto Toshiba (R200, R400), Sony (TZ series), HP (nc2400, nc2510) and Dell (D420/430) and tell them that they really should listen to some AC on Slashdot.
"some sort of crazy ultraportable"
and that also means they weight 2 lb instead of 5 lb. The last three of my laptops have all been ultraportables, and all together they still weight less than 15" notebooks out there.
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... and even if semiotic could not find and or name a single manufacturer who does so
I found the patent info on this... (Score:4, Funny)
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Honest.
ob simpsons reference (Score:1)
Re:I found the patent info on this... (Score:4, Funny)
Woosh! The attack misses.
Headcase88 taunts from afar
Headcase88 equips flame shield
Better information on this (Score:4, Informative)
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(But at 120GB, that's not nearly enough space!)
What about 3.5" drives? (Score:1, Interesting)
Can we stop using harddrives? (Score:1)
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And even still, flash wears out too. So it's not like we have a never-failing non-volatile memory system yet.
Re:Can we stop using hard drives? (Score:2)
flash-storage (Score:1)
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Reliability? (Score:2)
LS
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I was a seagate fanboy until 3 months ago. Lets just say that evening I could hear the (2 month old) 500gb seagate in my basement before I put the key in the door. (sounded like a circular saw)
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Re:Its still a toshiba (Score:5, Insightful)
I imagine that is the least of his worries. When I lost an 80GB drive a couple years ago I would have gladly paid several times the price of a new one if I could only have gotten the contents back. While a free replacement drive might lessen the blow somewhat--as geeky as it might sound--losing a hard drive with gigabytes of content you really care about is a gut-wrenching experience. Everything from my high school days (homework, projects, work, programming, games, music... everything) was gone in one fail swoop.
The only thing similar to it is having your house burn down. Sure insurance should cover it all, but there is no way to get back what was really lost. I suppose if nothing else it taught me the importance of hardware redundancy, though it seemed a high price to pay at the time.
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suse10
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With external hard drive prices these days, you have zero excuses for not having a backup.
I keep everything that must be kept in a separate folder, and I drag that to my external backup drive
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I feel your pain friend... I lost almost 3T of data a couple weeks ago, but it wasn't due to hardware failure... it happened on a RAID-6 array. An automated chkdsk munched all of it. I bought the hardware because, like you, I've lost data in the past due to unforseen failures, but just when you think you've covered all the angles, something else reaches out and bites you in the ass. It still goes to show though, that absolutely nothing can truly replace a pr
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Needless to say that sent me scurrying for the pile of smaller drives, many of which I had not reformatted yet. I did lose quite a bit of data though which is unfortunate. The only good
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My primary hard drive died yesterday without any warning. My big mistake was to run fsck and let it automatically repair errors. I should have just immediately hit the power button, installed a new drive, and dd the old one. That may not have worked either, as Linux was reporting hardware buffer errors on every few sectors, but at least the filesystem for the readable inodes wo
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2. Long-term: External disk or offsite via sftp. (It's one of the things I use my linux box at my parents' place for)
Then again, I learned my lessons the hard way, I'm not going to pretend I used to listen...
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It was just happy to see you and welcoming you home.
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I'm not the only one with this experience either.
safe to say, i wouldn't be crowing too loud about seagate drives.
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Seagate drives are the only ones I know of that still have a 5-year retail warranty. Why didn't you replace yours, then?
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Please keep in mind that this data is not scientific. i ALWAYS advise my clients to keep their important data in more than one place, because HDD failure is so common. I have noticed that Western Digital dri
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Oblig. (Score:2)
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