Beyond Nobel, Hard Drives Get Smart 156
mattnyc99 writes "Giant magnetoresistance got its day in the sun when it won the Nobel Prize in physics last week—and when Hitachi rode that spotlight by announcing they'd have a 4-terabyte desktop hard drive by 2011. It's about time says Glenn Derene over at Popular Mechanics, in what amounts to an ode to the rise and future of super hard drive capacity. From his great accompanying interview with data storage visionary and computer science legend Mark Kryder: 'To get to 10 Tbits per square inch will require a drastic change in recording technology ... Hitachi, Seagate, Western Digital and Samsung ... are currently working on this 10-terabits-per-square-inch goal, which would enable a 40-terabyte hard drive.'"
Re:Why Not Even Bigger? (Score:3, Informative)
Math error. 452 cm^2. Remember, you're squaring that 10.
Re:Hybrid drives (Score:3, Informative)
Perhaps it would be better to have two drives available to the OS with rated latencies and bandwidths. Then, the OS can make software-based decisions based on the usage profile of the machine (server, workstation, media, etc).
Alternatively, some rating could be given to each file installed by software installation programs. Things like help databases, samples, aux tools, uninstallers, etc could be thrown on lower-latency spin disks. The critical items like programs, DLLs, etc could be installed on the fast disks.