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.'"

2-Way Wrist HD

[Doc Ruby]

this 10-terabits-per-square-inch goal, which would enable a 40-terabyte hard drive.'

It could also enable a 750-gigabyte 1" radius HD, if they're really clever. Which could serve the Bluetooth wristphone/player we've all been waiting for. So we can stop referring to that mobile multimedia terminal as a "phone", and again more accurately as a "watch".

How do you back it up?

[HonkyLips]

I work in animation & video production and a single project can take up a terabyte... I'm all for storage increases but I have no idea how to back it all up... It's all very well for the Blu-Ray and HD-DVD club to go on about storing 30/50 gig on a disc but when your drive holds 4 terabytes (and you just know it will fill up quickly) the backup problems just get bigger too...

Progress in new directions

[mollog]

When I see headlines about 1TB drives, I immediately think of losing 1TB of data.

How about they put a RAID 1 array in a 3.5" form factor? Two separate platters, two head/arm assemblies, two SATA connectors.

Why Not Even Bigger?

[Ralph Spoilsport]

If you can get a TB on 1 inch drive, why not build a drive with the same density that's LOTS bigger? I imagine warping might be a problem, but I remember 10" winchester drives!

A 2.4cm drive has an area (just for this thought experiment) of (1.2 x 1.2)pi, or roughly,4.52 sq cm. now, a 10 inch drive (24cm) has an area of 45.2 sq cm.

So, that would make it a 45 TB drive. Data retrieval might be kind of slow, but: if you have massive RAM caching, it could be of great use. Imagine a home theatre with something like this.

Imagine buying a drive like this that comes pre-installed with every song ever produced by WEA or EMI or Sony/Columbia. Say, everything from 1925 onward. How much would you pay for such a drive?

Or, ALL the movies ever made by (name your favourite) movie studio between (date x) and (date y).

I'd pay some serious green for that. All the classic movies. All the great songs of history.

That's what we're facing, very very soon: the trivialisation of media technology.

And eventually, that 25cm drive holding 45TB becomes a 2 inch drive holding 90TB.

We should be able to predict the arrival of the $500 2 inch exabyte drive.

The entire collection of world culture, audio in mp3, film in mp4, and images in jpg. Japanese, chinese, American, canadian, English, French, Italian, Russian, etc etc etc. on one or maybe two drives, or even one for audio, one for video, and one for images.

what then? with all of audio and visual culture at your fingertips, what will we do with it? what will a society in the future (assuming it doesn't implode with the loss of petroleum, or vapourise itself fighting over it) DO with that much data commonly available. to anyone?

Will it be possible to write a new melody? Will it be possible to tell a new story? Will it be possible to make an image that matters? Some would argue that imaging is dead - eaten alive by advertising. some would argue that film is dead as all the stories are told, and now we're in a grid of "1 from column A, two from column B" kind of mix and match story telling. And some say that even music itself has run its course - washed up on the blandishments of pop, the inaccessibility of the academy, and the dumbed-down rumbling of a sold before it was born hiphop, and an inchoate melange of world music that mimics and fights the imperial culture.

When it's ALL on your drive, who cares? will culture just gradually wither away?

Maybe we will do better when the oil runs out, and the machines stop working. We'll have to sing to each other, and tell stories to each other by the fire, instead of the sitting around having the fire tell stories to us.

RS

Re:Hybrid drives

[ArcherB]

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.

I'd rather they be broken into separate drives. I'd like a flash based drive for my OS and maybe a few commonly used applications and a spinning HDD for all my data and backups.

Partitions

[Walzmyn]

What I want to know is if these new larger drives are going to come with new restrictions on partitioning the drives. I would love to be able to test drive a dozen or so different Linux distros, see what BSD is like, have a safe (somewhat) place to stick my /home while I upgrade - but I am limited by the number of partitions (got one taken up with winders).I know you can work it all around and do it with just 4 primaries, but it would really be nice to set up 15 or so partitions. Especialy if the drive has 4 terabites. Good Lord, I can't even fathom that much space.

For the record.

[Anonymous Coward]

Mário Norberto Baibich is the first to report the Giant magnetoresistance in 1988, he is the main author in an article published in the Physical Review Letters in 88, where Fert is a co-author .
Why this guy did not receive the Nobel Prize? Strange.....
Reference: http://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/200303/prl-6.cfm [aps.org]