Beyond Nobel, Hard Drives Get Smart

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:Steady March of Progress

[Beyond_GoodandEvil]

I'd like to know which factors have allowed (forced?) the disk storage industry to continue to advance at such a steady pace.
Easy pr0n, somebody should calculate how much disk space is required given mpeg2 compression to ensure that someone would have the equivalent of 60+ years of pr0n, that is how big hard disks will get.

Re:Steady March of Progress

[Anonymous Coward]

Systems with feedback (technology helps you make more and better technology) often go exponential until they ram into some kind of saturation limit. (Put bacteria in a dish with a food provided at a fixed rate, and the population will grow exponentially until it hits the resource limit and flatten out.) Some technologies have already passed their exponential stage and flattened out, whereas we've been fortunate with computer technology. Atomic scales pretty much set the limit there, and we're getting close, but haven't yet reached, that scale.

Re:Steady March of Progress

[realmolo]

Yeah! And why haven't they cured cancer yet? And why does it still cost $9 for a small soda at the movie theater? Lazy-ass researchers.

The reason that fuel efficiency and internet bandwidth haven't "increased" as much as hard drive space is because they are COMPLETELY DIFFERENT PROBLEMS with COMPLETELY DIFFERENT solutions.

For the average person

[Tribbin]

The biggest part of our hard disks are spent on movies, music and games.

Most of these are on thousands of computers.

Wouldn't a good sharing/streaming protocol/project be the solution for storage for the average person?

Re:For the average person

[Zironic]

For now and probably for quite a while disk space is cheaper then bandwidth.

Hybrid drives

[nojayuk]

I believe the higher capacity drives will force a rethink on how data is stored and accessed on standalone machines like laptops and desktops. I've only got a couple of terabytes of data on this machine and doing a file search over the five (I think, I can't actually remember how many drives I've got fitted in this thing) disks is already pretty time-consuming. The solution will be to add intelligence to the disk interface so that data indexing is done pre-emptively and the results cached on the fly.

The first generation of hybrid drives are already here but they're only at the beginning of their development cycle. HDD recording densities will increase as will flash RAM densities and that will improve access times but only for the most commonly accessed data.

Imagine a 10Tb HDD built in the classic 3.5" wide form factor, with 256Gb of 1024-bit-wide 150MWord/sec flash memory or MRAM on the controller board acting as cache. The spinning disk becomes a backing store for the flash where data is kept "fresh" by a smart algorithm. The drive spins down intelligently when not needed, saving power and reducing heat dissipation.

Higher recording densities are only one part of the future of disk drive technology.

Re:When is it going to stop?

[BenoitRen]

It just seems stupid to me to buy a HDD larger than you need. They should focus more on performance and reliability instead of size.

By the way, my non-development PC that I use most has a 6.2 GB HDD, which is currently barely 1.5 GB full.

Yeah, but...

[unitron]

That's great and all, but will we still be limited to 4 primary partitions?

Re:Progress in new directions

[ckedge]

Imagine running a raid-1 array where if one half of the array goes bad, you have to replace BOTH. This immediately doubles your failure cost. No way in heck is anyone going to do that. Instead their going to raid-1 their failed "integrated raid-1" drives until the second half fails itself. Anything else would be a gross waste of money and time.

> You have to do that yourself,

How is buying and plugging in a second drive "hard"? You already have to buy one, why not just tell the guy behind the counter "two". It's not like you have to go to the store twice. Open up your computer twice. etc.

> it takes money,

You're either going to pay twice as much for the "integrated raid-1" drive, or you're going to get half the capacity. You haven't suddenly made this any cheaper.

> and most importantly it takes up space and electricity.

See "it takes money". You're either using the same amount of space and electricity and getting half the capacity you could have, or you're paying twice as much, using twice the space, and twice the electricity.

Sorry, you're imaginary magic doesn't work in this dimension :)