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Hardware

The Future of Hard Drives: Ballistic Magnetoresist 198

Posted by chrisd from the flying-magnets dept.
Hirsto writes "Found this interesting story about breakthrough research on next generation drives. Here is a link to the NSF press release on this technology which supposedly enables storage densities of greater than 1 terabit per square inch. Devices might be on the market in 7 years, give or take."
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The Future of Hard Drives: Ballistic Magnetoresist More

The Future of Hard Drives: Ballistic Magnetoresist

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  • Confusing units (Score:2, Insightful)

    by tdvaughan ( 582870 )
    Did anyone else find the quoted statistics confusing?
    Each of the filaments can read infinitesimal magnetic fields and at room temperature can detect a 100,000 percent change in voltage. Shouldn't that be a 1/100,000 percent change?

    • Their 'science' bits don't make sense whatsoever. What's that junk about sensors swinging between 0.8 and 1.2 or -1000 and 1000 supposed to mean?

      As far as I can tell all they're trying to say is it's a thousand times more sensitive than current sensors. Maybe.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • They are claiming we will have capacities of 1 Terabyte per square inch in 7 years. This sounds very conservative. Please correct me if I am wrong, but my understanding is storage capacity more than doubling each year, and are we not at 100Gbits per square inch now? And if this is correct then we should habe Terabit per square inch capacities in half the time as this company expects to deliver it.

      • Please correct me if I am wrong, but my understanding is storage capacity more than doubling each year, and are we not at 100Gbits per square inch now?

        All true, but considering that the margins are so thin, I expect that R&D will be scaled back quite a bit, so that companies can actually make money. Either that, or maybe we'll see more specializations, with a couple places doing most of the research and then licensing the tech to all comers.

  • 'Might' Be? (Score:3, Funny)

    by MaestroSartori ( 146297 ) on Thursday February 20, 2003 @07:44AM (#5342655) Homepage
    Yes, they might be on the market in seven years. So might cold fusion and room-temperature superconductors.

    And cloaking devices.

    And an honest politician...

    • Re:'Might' Be? (Score:2, Funny)

      by kryliss ( 72493 )
      I think you might be pushing it with the honest politician. Cold fusion, room temperature superconductors and cloaking devices I can believe. Hell I'd believe that aliens have landed before I believe that there is an honest politician.

  • In other news (Score:4, Funny)

    by djupedal ( 584558 ) on Thursday February 20, 2003 @07:44AM (#5342656)
    Terabiit BM announced their latest offering in the 'Eye of the Needle' premium hard drive series, the LOC Plus, which uses the planetary orbit measurement of data storage and promises to hold in excess of 10X12> LOCs. The new unit goes on sale just in time for this season's channel fest on DynSat XIV.
  • 1x10^15x5.25= a lot of porn in the space of a single drive bay!!!

  • Hard Drives Can't Compete (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 20, 2003 @07:49AM (#5342674)
    As proved by IBM's recent move to dump its storage division, hard drives can't compete with other forms of storage. DRAM memories have gone down in price dramatically, to the point that they are on par with what magnetic storage prices were eight years ago. All this while maintaining their tremendous speed advantage. How far off can battery backed RAM storage systems be?

    The truth is, though, that neither system is much faster than it was eight years ago. While CPU speeds have increased tremendously (ten times or so), RAM and hard disk storage speeds have increased to about twice what they were. The forms of mass storage that have increased much more are getting more compelling. Optical storage has increased in speed dramatically, while falling in price even more dramatically. New higher density DVD replacements can only continue this trend.

    I expect that the combination of cheap super high performance mass storage (battery backed DRAM) and high speed mass optical storage (DVD replacements) will doom hard disks to the history cabinet of history. I know that I will be cheering when they are replaced by high speed optical media. After all, what good is your data if you can't see it?
    • If your hard drive goes bad you still have a chance of paying some specialist a lot of money to retrieve your data from it and if your data is valuable enough you'll be willing to pay the price. If your battery backup goes bad, the data is gone and nobody can get it back for you at any price.
    • My present system has more RAM than the disk space on my system a decade ago - a 20MB ST506 winchester. But guess what - I still retain about 5MB of data from that hard disk (mostly docs, personal accounts etc). Disk drives serve a functional need, and will continue to exist - I dare say, forever.

      Storing data in RAM may be faster, RAM prices may get cheaper, but DRAM will never compete. Actually hard disks give better storage life and value than tapes and tape drives for long-term archival.

      Thus disks can acts as:
      RAM - While 'swapping'
      Disks - For storage
      Tapes - For archival.

      Hard to see them fading away anytime soon.

      Most moderators are Morons. Sensible Moderators are Oxymorons.
    • I can go out to the local mega-buy and, while being fed bullshit by undertrained sales slugs, pick up 200GB 3.5" form factor hard drives till I get bored. Now, assuming they are about 3.5*5*.5inches, you have just over 10 cubic inches. Find me ANY dram based storage that you can BUY NOW that has anything near the density. I can get, not locally though, 1 GB dimms, and have heard of 4GB, but have not actually held one in my hand, so they don't exist in my reality. Even if they do, try to fit 50 of them in that space and not have them melt.

      Now, I am purposely leaving cost and speed out of this. While they are much faster, a quick check of pricewatch shows a 1G PC2100 DIMM is only $4 more than a 200GB HD. 50 DIMMs is slightly more than 1 200GB HD. Pretty competitive if I do say so myself, even ignoring the cost of a platform that could handle that much memory.

      Lastly, if you look at non-volatile memory, like flash, again ignoring the problems like finite writes, it is in the same price ballpark, though MUCH slower in speed than DDR. Pick your poison, but I will take HDs for 2% the cost, and about a 75% speed hit thank you.

      -Charlie
      • Lastly, if you look at non-volatile memory, like flash, again ignoring the problems like finite writes, it is in the same price ballpark, though MUCH slower in speed than DDR.

        But how does it compare to a hard drive in speed, and in read reliability? One could consider, for example, putting the OS on flash memory for quick booting and maybe program loading, if it compares well in both aspects.

  • Balistic Magno Terrorists?! (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 20, 2003 @07:51AM (#5342684)
    Sounds really dangerous! I'm calling Ashcroft now!

  • The more important matter: do they die as often? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 20, 2003 @07:52AM (#5342686)
    Really, for most non-warez (and related) people, a 20GB harddrive would be more than enough. Of course I'm aware of servers, datacenters, people working in film production, the music industry, et al, but these are hardly the majority of harddrive buyers.

    What I'd like to see is not "Terabit blahblah" but "secure, reliable blahblah".

    I don't want one of my harddrives to die every few months, despite quite light use.

    I don't want to have to back everything up in three places, out of fear for losing all my important work.

    I don't want my drives to go *whiiiiiiine KACHLUNK* for no damn reason at all. This actually happened yesterday with a drive only half a year old. Back in the 80s, the drives in my computers never died, and I can still boot up that ol' Macintosh SE, and the harddrive works. That's more than I can say about any of my computers from the late 90's.

    I want my harddrives to be as reliable as my RAM.

    • 20 GB enough? (Score:2, Insightful)

      by way2trivial ( 601132 )
      Really, for most non-warez (and related) people, a 20GB harddrive would be more than enough.
      um, time was, 3.4 gigs were enough Pent II systems
      time was, 200 Megabytes was plenty Pent/Pent PRo
      time was, 20 megaybytes (pc xt) was plenty
      time was, a 300k floppy was plenty apple //e

      Wait for it, and the usefulness of a terabyte to a home user will be achieved in our lifetimes

      • The Apple //e had 140K floppy disks.

        The original 13-sector floppy disks for the Apple ][ and ][+ held 113 3/4k

        • Re:20 GB enough? (Score:2, Interesting)

          by dontod ( 571749 )
          Every time there's a submission about bigger hard drives or faster CPUs someone always says 'you would only need this if you are a pirate/warez d00d'

          I, like others have a DV camcorder. I only have 15 or so hours of tape and I'm currently putting this uncompressed (to use with premiere) online. 1 hour = 13gb, so I'm already using 1 x 120gb drive and 2x 40gb.

          I would *love* a 1 terabyte hard drive right now, not in 3 years. Then I could add my legally owned DVDs, my 400 CDs in an uncompressed format and any other media such as captured TV programs.

          There are many 'legal' home uses for such storage. Luddite!

          Don

          --
          Hello and welcome to the Springfield Police department's Rescue Phone!... You have selected Regicide! (pause) If you know the name of the king or queen being murdered, press one!

    • Re:The more important matter: do they die as often (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      The parent post ranks up there with "640K of memory should be more than enough for anyone".

      Saying 20GB should be enough for most people lacks a certain amount of perspective that you only get with a lot of time in this industry. (I am guessing that you are less than 25 yrs. old, fairly new to the computer industry, or you really haven't given that comment much though - in haste to make a different point that reliability is more critical than size....tell my girlfriend that.)

      When 40MB drives came out, similar comments were made. When miniscule hard drives came out on the PC AT, similar comments were made.

      The reality is that it's difficult to foresee what the future will bring as far as storage needs, but the cool thing about this industry is that storage requirements expand to meet or exceed capacity.

      Here's a case in point.... Do you think that the average person's brain holds less than 20GB of data? I bet it's FAR more. My feeling is that a PC designed to assist the human can grow to demand similar amounts of storage to the human brain - why not?

      So my non-revolutionary prediction is that average software for average people will continue to demand more and more storage for the next century, and that 10 years from now, YOU will shutter at the fact that you ONLY have 20GB on that old circa-2003 PC, or will have long since abandon it for a much larger storage medium.

      Please come back to slash-dot in 10 years and repeat your comment that 20GB is plenty for the average user.
      • Hard drive space requirements are going to vary from user to user, and I think it's a safe assumption that most hard drives are far larger than a typical user needs, but that's not the point.

        Hard drives don't appear to have the life that they used to. On top of that, most major hard drive manufacturers cut their warranties from three to one year.

        That sucks. Maybe hard drives are big enough, just for now. Maybe they need to start being constructed better again.
        • (Begin pessimistic rant)

          Better, more reliable construction? Why would manufacturers do that? I guarantee they have the ability to build drives that will last 5X as long for a nominal price increase, but they will lose all their business at this rate. HD manufacturers are already seeing a decline in sales relative to the number of PC's out there because people who buy 120GB HD's are often quite content with this and don't go buy another.

          It's just like the car industry: they used to build cars that, given a little TLC, could operate for decades - hence antique auto shows - but now they die much sooner than that. How many Toyota Tercels are you going to see at antique car shows 50 years from now? Zero, because (other than the fact that they are ugly and they suck :-)) to quote every single person who's generation has given way to a new & improved version, "they don't make 'em like they used to". Cars are not built to last, they are built with a short usable life in mind so that consumers will keep buying new cars.

          Same thing with HDs. Most reasonable people back up their important information in one form or another so these companies have no qualms about making a limited-use product. Sometimes they do this so well that the HD dies on shipment or shortly thereafter so they recall them, tweak the design, claim there was an oversight that has now been resolved, and return their slightly-less accident-prone product to the market. Perhaps some companies are a little less insistent on screwing their customers, but I suspect they all do it in one form or another, and I suspect that they target home PC users (with much less individual buying power) than companies (with large server farms and big contracts).

          If I were out to make as much money as possible that is pretty much how I would do it: rapid turnover of product.

          (end pessimistic rant)
      • The parent post ranks up there with "640K of memory should be more than enough for anyone".

        I'll go ahead and agree with the parent. Sortof. I'd rather have 20GB of fast data storage than 100GB of current-speed stuff. I don't have a lot of reliability problems with hard drives, but I sure do sit and wait for head seeks.

        "...reliability is more critical than size....tell my girlfriend that."

        And if she disagrees, dump her. Certainly don't ever marry her.

    • Flawed Premise (Score:3, Insightful)

      by dreamchaser ( 49529 )
      I'd like to know what you base your assumptions on. I do not have one byte of warez or pirated anything on my main workstation at home, and I'm using 54 out of 60 gig. Add up the OS, applications/games, MP3's (ripped from CD's that I bought legally), personal data, etc. etc.

      I just love when people make pronouncements like that here, like they have actually done a survey and statistical analysis.

      Twenty gigabytes is enough for a casual PC user, barely. I'd say 60-100 is a better bet for today's 'power user', at a minimum.
      • Twenty gigabytes is enough for a casual PC user, barely. I'd say 60-100 is a better bet for today's 'power user', at a minimum.

        I have more than three opperating systems on my machine and I can tell you that 120 + gigs is not enough! (Don't all power users have multiple operating systems and VM's?) ;)

    • The next trend is that hard as drives costs will continue to drop, you will see more and more of them in consumer products market, like hifi, vcr, and so on, to store music, movies, TV and radio programs, and those devices have never enough hard drive space.
    • Really, for most non-warez (and related) people, a 20GB harddrive would be more than enough. Of course I'm aware of servers, datacenters, people working in film production, the music industry, et al, but these are hardly the majority of harddrive buyers.

      Add photographers to that list. I have shot close to 1G worth of still images in a day, and that is using lossy compression and a "mere" 3Mpixel camera.

      Back in the 80s, the drives in my computers never died, and I can still boot up that ol' Macintosh SE, and the harddrive works.

      Lots of older drives failed too. The drive in the Lisa (aka Mac XL...well, once new ROMs were put in) was prone to failure. I remeber the double eagle drives in the late 80s being failure prone too.

      I want my harddrives to be as reliable as my RAM.

      I want my car to be able to drive to mars, but it doesn't seem likely, nor does it seem likely that a highly complex mechinical device with exceptionally tight tolerences and moving parts will be as reliable as a solid state device.

      I quite want a reliable drive too. Fast would be nice, very arge storage capacity would be very very nice. Affordable woud also be nice. In fact it doesn't have to be a drive, it could be something that acts like one, but FLASH ROM is still too slow (to erase, reads are fast if you design right) and too costly.

    • There are quite a few things that are quite useful that you can't do today because of lack of storage:

      1) Rip your DVDs (media server) (approx 5 GB/DVD on average, new BluRay DVDs much more)

      2) Record HDTV (next gen PVR) (7.2 GB/hour max for ATSC)

      3) Record every channel on your cable at once (45 GB/hour approx with 100 channels at 1 Mbps)

      4) Store all my DV cam footage on my hard drive (11 GB/hour)

      So yes, today if I had a 1 TB drive, I could very well make use of it as could many others.
    • It is a dupe :-)
    • I've posted this before, but this time gets a disclaimer. This one isn't quite a dupe, since we got a new link. New article, new take on the subject, blahblahblah. But I make my offer anyway:

      For a reasonable fee per story, I am offering my services to the editors of /. as a proofreader and duplicate checker. Additionally, I will assist if necessary (at a negotiable hourly rate) in adding code to automatically send the draft article blurbs to my wireless device. I am unable to proofread overnight (I have to sleep sometime), so that will have to be covered by another shift, or written off as "happy slashdot error time."

      Note that volunteers for the night shift [slashdot.org] and hangover/holiday time [slashdot.org] have already been obtained.

      I cannot guarantee 100% error correction, but I will stake my job on significantly decreased rates of grammar and spelling mistakes, and far fewer duplicate postings.

      I would also like a T-shirt that says "I work for slashdot".

      Please, for the sake of your readers, hire me. I want to help!

      This offer will be repeated (as is fitting) with each dupe.
      • For a reasonable fee per story, I am offering my services to the editors of /. as a proofreader and duplicate checker

        You mean, you're willing to be another /. editor?? If you became one, your good intentions would fade within days. Soon you'd be posting dupes and saying, like CommanderTaco, "It's a dupe, but it's still neat!!!!!

  • Looks like (Score:3, Funny)

    by Timesprout ( 579035 ) on Thursday February 20, 2003 @07:55AM (#5342697)
    Chopra said the ballistic electrons lead to clearer binary signals -- at least in part. However, "we don't fully understand how the signal is enhanced to such very large degrees," he said. "The existing theories don't yet explain it. There are some things here no one quite understands. That means there's a lot of science to be discovered yet."
    Look like the Continuum are winding the IBM engineers up this week.

  • So... (Score:2, Offtopic)

    by jj_johny ( 626460 )
    all that stuff I see on Alias is real then! Next thing ya know that stuff on Star Trek is real too and they just been keeping it from us. What I really want is for all that Batman stuff to be real - I could really use a big car like batman to get through all this snow around my house.

  • How do they come up with this? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by adamofgreyskull ( 640712 ) on Thursday February 20, 2003 @07:59AM (#5342713)
    Chopra said the ballistic electrons lead to clearer binary signals -- at least in part. However, "we don't fully understand how the signal is enhanced to such very large degrees," he said. "The existing theories don't yet explain it. There are some things here no one quite understands. That means there's a lot of science to be discovered yet."

    Do they just try making bits smaller and smaller, and out of increasingly diverse kinds of materials until they find something that works or what? Serious question..
    • Well, not saying that it applies in this case in the slightest, but a property or behavior can be discovered and put to work well before its even remotely understood.

      One prime example of this is X-Rays. Discovered around 1896-7 timeframe, and put to use setting bones in the fields of the Crimean (or maybe Prussian) war about a month later. All I'm saying is that you may stumble across a regime of high amplification of a signal, and want to exploit it before really understanding the underlying Physics of the situation.
    • Sounds to me like this "ballistic electron" effect is a direct consequence of narrower signal paths, probably some ugly quantum theory behind it. Yes it's the kind of effect they probably simply ran into.

      It's kinda the same kind of thing that happened when they had accelerated an electron to 1/10th lightspeed, and wanted to make it go ten times as fast. The classic theory used to say that would require 10^2 = 100 times the energy.

      I imagine we'll see a lot more of these quantum problems show up as we develop nanotechnology...

      Kjella

  • slashdot headlines (Score:5, Funny)

    by X_Caffeine ( 451624 ) on Thursday February 20, 2003 @08:00AM (#5342715)
    According to the past couple months of Slashdot headlines, the hard drive of tomorrow will use microscopic whiskers, be solid state [slashdot.org], use nickel whisker-like filaments [slashdot.org] (oh wait, this is another repeat post!), be the size of a credit card [slashdot.org], cost less than 1$/gig [slashdot.org], run at 15000 RPM [slashdot.org], use state of the art IBM pixie dust [slashdot.org], support bluetooth [slashdot.org], might even be Serial-ATA [slashdot.org] (...nah), and still be full of all the data you forgot to erase [slashdot.org].

    Enough "hard drive of tomorrow" articles, already.

    • all of these are "emerging technologies". Honestly. shouldn;t we consider this the possible drives of the *future*? Whan I think of the drive of tomorrow, I wanna know what will be available TOMORROW or at least int he very near term. When will I be able to buy a 500gig hard drive? I'm sure this isn;t too far off. Let me know about that. Not just possiblities that have on preliminary research completed.
    • It's called DHYB (don't hold your breath) drives.

  • 7 years?? (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward

    I don't know if I can wait that long. I was hoping it would be more like 5-10 years. ;)

  • Mechanical drives vs. solid state storage (Score:5, Interesting)

    by chancegray ( 64396 ) <chance.chancegray@com> on Thursday February 20, 2003 @08:07AM (#5342746) Homepage Journal
    Shouldn't we be moving over to some time of solid state storage devices soon? It seems like it would be a more reliable solution than all the moving parts in hard drives. Does anyone have some links on this?
    • They're still priced as server-class disks for holding stuff that gets used often, kinda like a huge cache. I was hoping they would start showing up in laptops, as they would have the most need of shock protection, but so far I haven't seen any. Presumably, with all the laptops being used as the *only* PC, most people want a fairly sizable hard disk and not just a few GB of SSD, and I don't think there's room for both. As for me, having both a PC + a laptop, I would certainly welcome a SSD laptop.

      P.S. If you want links, check out http://www.storagesearch.com/ssd.html

      Kjella
    • I was looking through Buy.com's clearance items last week and came across this [buy.com]. Now there's a deal. 134MB for only $440. And that's at a whopping 86% off! Of course, 134 MB is a bit small... so instead you can buy a 3.2G version. For $28,000. Each. I suspect quantity discounts are available.

      Solid state disk is a long ways off if you want anything even vaguely affordable - there simply isn't enough market demand to make prices reasonable.
    • First is that the cost/gb is much higher. The second is that non-volatile flash memories have a limited number of writes. 1000 or so for compact flash media, IIRC. Non-volatile, battery backed, has the problem of: What if the battery dies?

      What might work is, say, a 1 gigabyte solid state module for the OS and files needed at boot (GUI, etc), for startup speed,and maybe another for the most commonly used applications. Everything else, including data, goes on large hard drives.

  • The question is... (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    How many Libraries of congerss (LOC) can I fit onto a drive the size of a credit card?

  • Nanotech (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Gryftir ( 161058 ) on Thursday February 20, 2003 @08:08AM (#5342752)
    What's really juicy to me is the applications for nanotech, as mentioned in the article. I wonder if this kind of technology could be used to tranfer data to nanites. Now that *would* be a small hard drive.

    Gryftir

  • It will never get here (Score:5, Funny)

    by AppyPappy ( 64817 ) on Thursday February 20, 2003 @08:09AM (#5342754)
    Devices might be on the market in 7 years, give or take."


    That's forever!
    7 years is 49 years in computer years. Seven years ago, I was running Windows 3.1 on a 486 in my office. I'll either be pushing up the daisies or in a zoo with the placard "Last Remaining COBOL Programmer" over my cage.

  • What is big enough? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by unfortunateson ( 527551 ) on Thursday February 20, 2003 @08:10AM (#5342762) Journal
    No pr0n jokes, please... how big does a hard drive need to be? I mean, once everyone is doing their own digital video, PVR software, archiving their entire music library in MP3 format... you're only up to a couple-hundred GB. Does a 4TB hard drive make sense in a personal computer? Can you apply the TB/inch in much smaller form factors, such as SD cards? Even there, do I need more than, say 20GB on a palm pilot? How do you back up such huge systems? Summary: the server market has a use for these future maxi-drives, but they'll be a hard sell to the general public.
    • It actually has great use in all media outlets. As we get closer to full integration of the computer into any home environment, who's to say that the PC won't become a headless operator with multiple outputs across the house for access, much like servers are, now? The whole thing to keep is mind is that while hard drives get bigger, the bar for what consumers can have on them will get bigger. As more things move to being 'media center' oriented, you'll find space, speed and clarity improvements across the board. For example, the newest consumer-grade operating system, WindowsXP, is almost 2G on its own, default install. Compare that with W2K, about 1.5G, and Win98, I think a scarce 200M or 500M and you can see that since the default level of hard drive size has risen to about 20G - 40G, so has the general amount of stuff in there.

      You may cry bloatware, and a lot of XP is unnecessary UI, but the cry you give is about the people who would buy it. You cannot educate the masses, and you cannot make their choices for them. All we can do is attempt to push for the best possible outcome. The drive for innovation in any and all areas will give better standards for us all to live on. The bigger hard drives are, the faster processors and RAM must be to fill them.

    • Re:What is big enough? (Score:4, Informative)

      by irc.goatse.cx troll ( 593289 ) on Thursday February 20, 2003 @08:33AM (#5342847) Journal
      "No pr0n jokes, please..."
      No joke about it - you give me space and I can fill it with pr0n.

      "how big does a hard drive need to be?"
      Infinetly big.

      "I mean, once everyone is doing their own digital video, PVR software"
      There is no limit on the PVR part. Why have to delete old shows when you could put them up on an internal p2p-like engine so people that missed the show can get it?

      "archiving their entire music library in MP3 format..."
      Mp3? Why? We use mp3 to save disk space at the cost of quality. I'm not going to get into a flame war, But if we had the space everything would be lossless.

      "you're only up to a couple-hundred GB"
      After my corrections, You're up to atleast a TB.
      "Does a 4TB hard drive make sense in a personal computer?"
      In 7 years? of course. 7 years ago, did the 200gig+ harddrives we have today make sense? Sure, you have your gifs, your texts from the scene, etc, but thats only a few houndred megs MAX.

      "Can you apply the TB/inch in much smaller form factors, such as SD cards?"
      Sure.
      "Even there, do I need more than, say 20GB on a palm pilot?"
      Factor in constant gps tracking on your palm (A neat new idea no ones done that I know of), Maybe throw some video/mp3 storage (recording?) on there since everyone likes integration.. 20gb sounds great.

      "How do you back up such huge systems?"
      Another?

      "Summary: the server market has a use for these future maxi-drives, but they'll be a hard sell to the general public."
      The general public of today, maybe, but this isnt a product review, its a future technology.
      • "Even there, do I need more than, say 20GB on a palm pilot?"
        Factor in constant gps tracking on your palm (A neat new idea no ones done that I know of), Maybe throw some video/mp3 storage (recording?) on there since everyone likes integration.. 20gb sounds great.

        I do. Well, it's a pocket pc, but I do it. What I really want is topo maps and surface images, with GPS tracking overlay. That would push pretty much everything.
    • I mean, once everyone is doing their own digital video, PVR software, archiving their entire music library in MP3 format... you're only up to a couple-hundred GB.

      Remember the days when the advent of Cd-ROMs was to be the death of hard drive space worries? Look at us now: 4 or 5 cd game distributions are fairly common. Every time an MP3/OGG article comes up here a handfull of audiophiles coment on how no true audiophile would give in to a lossy format. These are problems today that could be solved by this.

      Think about future technology though: How much storage space will 3D holographic projections take? With terrabytes of disc space game textures could be highdef photographs. Models in games could have insane detail and polycounts (assuming that other graphics tech keeps advancing). High detail virtual worlds... A driving game where you can drive to every city in the world... I mean.. when's the last time you heard anyone bitch about having too much space on their hands?

    • If you're connected to a fat pipe, people tend to stop worrying so much about hoarding stuff, and start using it instead. I know some people sitting on a 100mb line, and they're mostly interested in streaming stuff. E.g. stream music from their computer to the computer at the party they're at, for instance. Or to download at whereever they can plug in with their portable player.

      The reasoning is this - if you can stream it faster than you can use it, why care about downloading it? E.g. they look at other peoples movies over the network - directly from that machine. Unlike now, where everybody with a slower line (even normal broadband is "slow" for what I'm talking about) "have to" have their own copy. Imagine if you and your friends simply mutually mapped up folders, would easily cut hard disk use by far.

      This just works for things that are naturally streamable, like music and movies. As for things where you need the full thing at once, like games, I remember "The 7th Guest" that came on 2 CDs back in... ancient history. Most games are still on 3 CDs or less. So relative to hard disks, they've become smaller and smaller...

      So yes, I also think that the need for enormous hard disks might not be that incredibly big. But not because they don't need it - people will simply have access to other peoples files as excellent substitutes.

      Kjella
    • Lets see, I currently have 1.4TB of storage and always looking to add more.

      On that storage I have my DVD electronic jukebox, (not-pirated), my mp3's, images of my various computers builds (past, present, and future) Archives of all my computer CD's, over 20,000 5mp digital images, a ton of food recipes, complete with digital images, 6 years of archived non-spam email, and tons of other stuff.

      You know what I definitely need more space, for my Digital video's, my Oracle instances, More digital images, my archive of my older Atari, amiga, apple software, my automotive repair manuals and videos, my home repair books and videos, my index for all the info, and tons of other things I haven't thought of.

      Don't think you'll ever need this stuff? Well, once you've played with having much of the stuff you need online, the need for it increases. Yea, today large amounts of data may be a lunatic fringe, but tomorrow it will be normal.

      I also want less spinning disks, when you have TB of data on scsi and ide drives, failure of drives becomes more common

      Now I just need to scrape up enough $$$ to purchase an EMC SAN.
    • With a hard disk, I'll put down the book of botany. With a big drive, I'll add photos along. With a even bigger drive, I'll scan the trees and flowers. I'll need a next generation hard disk to store the budding of seeds, blooming of flowers in mpg. Seeeee it never ends.

    • Don't be short-sighted... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by gosand ( 234100 ) on Thursday February 20, 2003 @09:45AM (#5343387)
      No pr0n jokes, please... how big does a hard drive need to be? I mean, once everyone is doing their own digital video, PVR software, archiving their entire music library in MP3 format... you're only up to a couple-hundred GB. Does a 4TB hard drive make sense in a personal computer? Can you apply the TB/inch in much smaller form factors, such as SD cards? Even there, do I need more than, say 20GB on a palm pilot? How do you back up such huge systems? Summary: the server market has a use for these future maxi-drives, but they'll be a hard sell to the general public.

      It still amazes me that tech people can be so short-sighted.

      Stop thinking with your current brain - think with the brain that you'll have in 10 years! Think about where we were 10 years ago. What was the fastest PC you could buy? I believe that the Pentium was just being released. Now I have a Pentium that just acts as my firewall, because it can't really do much else. Hard drives were around 200 MB I think. What if engineers back then said "why would you ever need more than 200 MB?" Reasons for more storage? How about 100GB on a card the size of a compact flash card. For what? How about to replace DVDs? We rip our music to the MP3 format to save space. We encode movies to save space. Ask a TiVO owner if they would like to have a TB drive. Then ask a TiVO owner who has HDTV.

      Your backup issues are not relative either. How do you back up a 100MB drive? With a bigger drive. How do you back up a 10GB drive? With a bigger drive. You can see where this is going.

      Think about this: Look at the way drives work now. We (well, the OS really) reuses the space on them, and has to keep track of where all the data physically resides on the disk. What if the drive was so large, say 10 TB, that you didn't need to do that? Instead of deleting something off the drive, you simply write it to a new location and move on. I know that is what happens now, but there would me less management of that data if it didn't have to consider size constraints. Now we use disks that spin, and talk about seek time and platters. With advances in storage, these could be things of the past. Who knows, maybe data will be stored in an organically organized 3D matrix of atomic-level particles, and seek time will be static. Maybe there will be no heat build-up, no moving parts to fail.

      The possibilities of endless, instant-access storage would be amazing. 24/7 digital video recording for security systems. Las Vegas alone could use this. No more wondering "do I have enough space to install this?". Want to install the latest release of RedHat 23.0, just install it to a new partition (or quadrant, or whatever we have) and go.

      I am just throwing out stuff here, but we have advanced pretty far in 10 years because of advancements in technology. Sure, the ideas have been there too, but the technology has to be in sync for it to take off. (Apple Newton?) I know the tech industry hasn't been around that long, but we have some history to look back on. Don't say things like "I'll never use that much space" or "Why would I need a processor that powerful?". We will need it, we will think of ways to use it.

    • how big does a hard drive need to be? I mean, once everyone is doing their own digital video, PVR software, archiving their entire music library in MP3 format... you're only up to a couple-hundred GB

      I don't even know why I'm bothering posting an answer to this question as the answer is probably very obvious to so many folks.

      Every time a get a new generation hard drive that is an order of magnitude bigger than what I had before, I think to myself, "What in the world is going to fill this puppy up?" And the immediate answer in my own mind is always, "I don't know, but I already wish it was much bigger." And you know what? I'm always right. If 100TB drives were common right now, trust me, stuff would come along to fill it.

      I have +-140gigs of storage at home right now, and it's full. I just ordered another 80gigs (which is the best value point right now) and when I was ordering it I was wishing that 200gigs was the best value point and I could afford two of them: one to fill, and one to back up with!

    • Does a 4TB hard drive make sense in a personal computer?

      If you don't have one, how are you going to install Windows 2010?

  • Hard Drives: Ballistic
    whenever I go out to buy new hardware, my wife goes ballistic. Does this count too?

  • sensitive (Score:4, Funny)

    by derhurz ( 531705 ) on Thursday February 20, 2003 @08:24AM (#5342808) Homepage
    ...at room temperature can detect a 100,000 percent change in voltage...

    Big deal. I detected a similar change in voltage in my body, last time I was messing with the wiring in my flat.

  • Can you imagine the tape backups for this? We'd have tapes the size of suitcases, and a backup run taking days instead of hours. Or maybe in the dim and distant future we'll all have raided systems.
  • Just out of curiosity, how fast or slow would you be able to read the data from a drive like that? You'd want to be well into the hundreds of Mb/s in order to make it useful right? (100Mb/s would take 2.66 hours to read the whole Tb right?) And since hard drives aren't a single square inch, you'd really want read/write rates closer to Gb/s.

    Completely different notes:
    How failure prone/tolerant are these whiskers? I wouldn't want to lose any amount of access or data if one of those whiskers breaks off and sticks to the drive platter.

    • Well I don't think there's a lab chimp gluing ONE whisker per head mount! Given the sizes these things have it's more probably a suspension to be sprayed on the sensor tip (carbon nanotubes are worked this way). Of course the larger the surface is worse the spatial resolution becomes but you can get several thousands of these things in place and get a decent mtbf. It's a tradeoff (as usual...)

  • all very well, but more spindles please (Score:4, Interesting)

    by new death barbie ( 240326 ) on Thursday February 20, 2003 @08:47AM (#5342934)
    This technology will have its uses, but most apps will benefit more from an increase in the disk I/O rate, not data volume. Most disks are good for about 50 I/O operations per second. The size of the I/O is less important than latency, I/O bus bandwidth, etc. That's why it is important to have multiple I/O operations occurring simultatneously.

    Any DBA will tell you that if you want a multi-terabyte database, you sure as hell ain't gonna build it with 1TB disks. There may be a few exceptions, where volume is everything, but even huge data collection tasks like those used in oil exploration, speed is of the essence -- and so striping a file over several spindles is highly desirable.

    At the risk of overgeneralizing, your typical business database would probably fit many times over on any 60-gig off-the-shelf disk. But it would be stupid to design it that way, both for the sake of robustness, and for the sake of throughput. You want to spread things out.

    So sure, increasingly big disks are of some interest, but it's mostly academic. Give me better throughput for the same size disks as I have now, and then I'll get excited.

  • How fast will it be compared to future RAM and cache memory? Does anyone with some insight have any good guess? Because if the new hard drives will be really fast it will change programming as we know it to some extent. Will it replace RAM and even cache memory? Will gigantic 2d arrays be no problem? I remember reading somewhere --- nyteknik.se? --- that these new hard drives would replace RAM but I'm not sure I trust that;)
  • What of Holographic memory? I've been telling my tech. pals that it was just around the corner since back in '87.

    Holographic memory!!!


    blakespot

  • Are we actually getting to a point technologically where compression is getting better, hard drives capacity larger, procs faster, computers seen but not heard etc... where there won't be a need or a want to upgrade as are home technology will be sufficient for our needs for many years at a time?

    Granted there will be a want for the latest and greatest gadgets for some but the general populace might be easily satisfied with a computer that is incorporated into the entertainment altar. As long as it records the music and shows they want.

    At that point will the newest technologies skyrocket in price because demand for new stuff has been replace with the satisfaction of the larger populace with their own gadgetry?

  • What's a "square inch"? (Score:3, Funny)

    by Stiletto ( 12066 ) on Thursday February 20, 2003 @09:22AM (#5343192)

    This is science news. What in the world is a square inch? Does it have something to do with a slug or a furlong??
  • I'd rather have solid state memory and such that isn't succeptible to crashes as much, rather than improve current hard drives. Solid State is faster, and much more reliable.

    The biggest problem right now isn't cheap storage, it's reliable storage. We spend to much backing up... One offsite, in case of fire, AND one onsite, incase of crash... Should get rid of the ladder.

  • No need? (Score:3, Informative)

    by kylant ( 527449 ) on Thursday February 20, 2003 @09:38AM (#5343333)
    If you think, that no single person will ever need this amount of storage in a PC, think about this:

    My DVD-Collection (400 discs) would need about more than 2TB to be accessible with one click...

    The 60 channels I receive via my digital satellite deliver more than 2TB of data per day...if I'd like to have only the last week accesible, thats more than 14TB...

    My favorite TV show (Babylon 5) uses about 250 GB of storage space (if they should finally deliver the seasons 2-5) - and there are many more TV shows I like...

    If you're going to use HDTV, the amount of data would be quadrupled...
    • How the fuck do you have 400 DVD discs.

      I don't think I have even seen 400 movies in my entire life.

      I think you watch too much TV.
  • Does anybody know what the cluster sizes would be for future large-capacity drives. I mean, right now we're using mostly FAT32, NTFS, and/or EXT2/3 in the PC world. Are these filesystem capable of sustaining a drive of such an enormous size. I remember how FAT16 limited drives to about 2GB or so, and how a lot of old machines won't use drives greater than this size (at least not without a bootstrap).

    So, if these giganto drives come out, how compatible are they going to be with older hardware. Yes, I know many people won't be using anything near today's PC's in 7 years or so, but a lot of people still won't have the latest & greatest - but may need a large drive.

    Also, if they bring out FAT66 (or an equiv), cluster sizes are going to rudely large...

    • Does anybody know what the cluster sizes would be for future large-capacity drives.

      Probably 4k. It holds a small file completely and is the same size as a page of memory, so it's convenient that way. The current filesystems (Ext2, NTFS) are more than sufficient to a 1TB filesystem.

  • for the male part of the market (you know who you are) that will buy anything labelled 'ballistic'.

  • Say what you like about whether we need more or faster or cheaper storage (hint: yes, we will need them - what's the good of advances in other components if you're looking at a bottleneck elsewhere?) - I am sick to the back teeth of seeing articles about the next persistant mass storage technology. Last I checked, the hard drives I'm buying are still a stack of magnetic platters with a set of servo-controlled heads.

    Wake me up when there's a new technology On The Market not Real Soon Now. And no, Virignia, huge flash RAM devices do not count.

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