The Limits To Perpendicular Recording 222
peterkern writes "Samsung has a new hard drive and says it can now store 667 GB on one disk, which comes out to be about 739 Gb/sq. in. That is more than five times the density when perpendicular recording was introduced back in 2006, and it is getting close to the generally expected soft limit of 1 Tb/sq. in. It's great that we can now store 2 TB on one hard drive and that 3-TB hard drives are already feasible. But how far can it go? It appears that the hard drive industry may start talking about heat-assisted magnetic recording again, soon."
Heat-assisted magnetic recording? (Score:5, Insightful)
I knew this was a kdawson post... (Score:4, Insightful)
Stop Making It Bigger. Start Making It Faster! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:TFA is unreadable. (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh, wow, a 3-gigabyte drive! How futuristic!
Seriously, what sort of monkey messed the article up this badly?
This is slashdot, in the 12 years I've been wasting time here, I am more surprised when they get a story with all of the facts, spelling and concepts correct!
Re:Stop Making It Bigger. Start Making It Faster! (Score:5, Insightful)
That's what the SSD market does.
Hard drive are gone, floppy style (Score:1, Insightful)
Forget hard drives, currently they are the main bottleneck in your computer, SSDs and the like are the future.
Actually we can even see now that ram is obsolete, once SSD catch up in speed (you don't even need current ram speed) why would anyone care about transfering data to ram, work on it then store it back? Just work straight on your data, gone are the days of saving, now will be the days of deleting, temporary working directory...
hard drives, they ain't part of the future me thinks.
Re:TFA is unreadable. (Score:5, Insightful)
This is the internet. Facts, spelling, and concepts are all optional.
Re:Heat-assisted magnetic recording? (Score:2, Insightful)
There, fixed that for you.
Re:Hard drive are gone, floppy style (Score:5, Insightful)
The fastest RAM available today operates at roughly a thousand times faster than flash (SSDs are only fast because they tend to have many channels (Intel uses 10) in order to improve performance), and RAM speeds continue to increase by moore's law. It's unlikely that flash will ever catch up, and the limitations of flash (wear) would make it completely unsuitable, even with large improvements in number of usable cycles.
What it could be useful for is as a shadow to RAM for fast hibernation support. Imagine a computer with 4GB of RAM and 4GB of flash (with a suitable degree of parallelism for speed purposes). If you do a decent job of keeping that flash relatively up to date with the contents of system RAM such that there is a relatively minor difference between system RAM and flash at any given time, hibernations could be done in under a second, and restoring from hibernation could be done at better than SSD speeds even if the computer is using a cheaper magnetic disk.
If you were smart about it, you could even resume execution almost immediately after you copied a bare minimum of data, and allow the user to interact with the system while the rest of memory is copied from flash to RAM, handling any uncopied data the user requests on the fly.
Re:Hard drive are gone, floppy style (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually we can even see now that ram is obsolete, once SSD catch up in speed (you don't even need current ram speed) why would anyone care about transfering data to ram, work on it then store it back? Just work straight on your data, gone are the days of saving, now will be the days of deleting, temporary working directory...
This is the dumbest thing I've ever read.
Re:I knew this was a kdawson post... (Score:1, Insightful)
Bullshit. He's right. Slashdot is a sack of shit sometimes. And instead of simply not reading it, he's complaining in the hopes they get a small message eventually and maybe strive to be better.
In the long run, people talking about what a declining news site Slashdot is should have some effect.
Kdawson should never have been allowed to speak here. Slashdot was supposed to filter out this type of garbage.
Re:Stop Making It Bigger. Start Making It Faster! (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Stop Making It Bigger. Start Making It Faster! (Score:3, Insightful)
You say slow, but at that density the throughput will still be quick.
Re:Hard drive are gone, floppy style (Score:3, Insightful)
Welcome to the world of tomorrow!
Re:Hard drive are gone, floppy style (Score:2, Insightful)
If non-volatile memory speed ever catches up to volatile memory speed, a "working area" (i.e. what people commonly know as RAM) will no longer be necessary. This is not a dumb idea. It's a possibility.
Your post is the Unfunniest Score:5 Funny that I've ever read.