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."
SQUID's next? (Score:3, Interesting)
Maybe other technologies as well (Score:3, Interesting)
There are other technologies that I'm sure HDD makers have waiting in the wings. If areal density doesn't go up fast enough, I'm sure that HDD makers will go back to stacking platters, and we will start seeing fatter 2.5" drives. Perhaps even a return of Bigfoot drives, or double-height 2.5" drives as a new form factor. Of course, these drives will have to have some engineering done to keep performance.
I can see a full height 5.25", a monstrosity these days, but inside it would have a bunch of tiered storage with the controller doing the work and multiple caches using not just DRAM, but flash RAM, and wise positioning of data (more commonly accessed stuff closer to the spindle for example.)
This is the last resort of drive makers, but I'm sure if nothing else pans out to keep capacities growing, they will start adding platters.
SSDs are the future (Score:3, Interesting)
I think a more realistic assessment is that the rate of growth in hard disk densities will decline.
We've had a recent article on the shortcomings of SSDs, but I think the maturity of hard disk technology and the minimum cost posed by the complicated mechanical design will make hard disks obsolete for most applications in a few more years. Hey, people thought 3.5" disks would be here forever, too.
Re:Stop Making It Bigger. Start Making It Faster! (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Stop Making It Bigger. Start Making It Faster! (Score:3, Interesting)
No, make it bigger! Bring back 5.25" form factor drives!
If they made them cheap enough, I would buy 6TB quantum bigfoots for archival purposes.
Re:Stop Making It Bigger. Start Making It Faster! (Score:2, Interesting)
There should be factors of human proportions that limit the need for exponentially increasing growth at some point.
Human perception in audio has already been passed both in frequency and dynamic domains. Static images are reaching that threshold, and we do already have lossless encodings that pass it. Motion pictures will be the next threshold, and then I suppose holography. So there goes my argument that we can limit the need for exponential growth, oh well.
I think it's funny that you can probably store all known pre-17th century literature and a decent representation of art, music, and architecture of the whole pre-industrial period on a pocketable medium.
Re:Stop Making It Bigger. Start Making It Faster! (Score:1, Interesting)
Don't know what SSDs you're not using, but last time I checked even entry level ones from a couple of years ago write twice as fast as any spinner out there now. The new SSDs now are several times faster than that. (Read and write.)
I won't argue on size, but life is even steven. I ditch all spinners after 3-5 years since they are living on borrowed time after the warrenty runs out, so who cares if the standard drives last longer. Only an idiot would trust any kind of drive for the long term.
My pair of orange OCZ SSDs are going on their 3rd year and are still humming along nicely. They'll get dumped into a car PC build I plan on doing and replaced by the latest and the greatest when I rebuild my main PC.
Re:Stop Making It Bigger. Start Making It Faster! (Score:2, Interesting)
Static images are reaching that threshold, and we do already have lossless encodings that pass it.
I'm not going to comment on resolution, but in terms of dynamic range, I don't think we're anywhere near limits of human perception. Certainly not in anything that approaches a consumer-level device.
Re:Where do you back it up? (Score:2, Interesting)
Drives that big, you buy them in pairs, one mirrored to the other.
If my "mirrored" you mean "RAID 1", I would say that barely counts as a backup. There are essentially three or four substantial threats for why you need a backup, and RAID 1 protects you against just one of them. (If you're counting, the four threats are (1) drive failure, (2) your power supply committing murder-suicide and taking out your drives, (3) your house burning down or computer being destroyed (you can combine 2&3 if you want), (4) software corruption.
The first rule of backups is "make backups". The second rule of backups is "make backups". But the third rule of backups, if you ask me, is "RAID isn't backups". (The fourth rule is perhaps "check your backups to make sure you can restore from them.")
(What you should do is buy in pairs, put one in an external enclosure, and periodically sync them. Keep the second drive unplugged from everything when it's not actually being synced.)
Re:More than feasible (Score:3, Interesting)
Ooooh. Can of worms time.
The problem is that a drive of two real terabytes (not marketing terabytes) is one 512byte sector too large for a normal MBR partition table. So you have to switch over to something else; Windows uses a GPT style partition table.
Unfortunately the committee who designed GPT were dumb (Some of the members must have been smart though, you can easily work around every dumb choice I've seen). A current BIOS doesn't know anything about partition tables and it has no problem with drives up to (IIRC) 64 petabytes. The committee decided that the BIOS should contain a boot manager that understands GPT structures. The BIOS makers don't want this problem; their stuff works fine, some people are already using RAID devices with far in access of 3TB and every OS that can handle a 3TB drive can boot off it ... except Windows.
So it's SNAFU by Microsoft. The weird thing is this time they did it by following the written standard and ignoring the defacto standard ...