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Data Storage

Shaking Hard Drives Instead of Spinning? 252

Posted by CmdrTaco from the you-don't-think-about-that-every-day dept.
Twyko64 writes "A UK startup called Dataslide aims to develop 'hard drives' made of oscillating sheets of LCD-screen-like material with piezo-electronic actuators and many, many read:write heads. A 'hard drive' could be the same size and shape as an LCD screen. I wrote a this piece on Techworld about it."
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Shaking Hard Drives Instead of Spinning? More

Shaking Hard Drives Instead of Spinning?

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  • Bond Drive... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 08, 2004 @10:15AM (#10754450)
    Cue jokes about "shaken, not stirred..."

  • 20" (Score:3, Funny)

    by 3770 ( 560838 ) on Monday November 08, 2004 @10:15AM (#10754453) Homepage
    Man, a 20" hard drive.

    That's not progress.

    • Re:20" (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      is there any benifit to this? i mean, it sounds like if we had this to start out with, our current hard drives would be an improvement. just because something is different doesn't mean it's better.

    • Re:20" (Score:2, Interesting)

      by FatherKabral ( 819599 ) *
      That depends on how the technology might be applied. If in that 20" you had a storage density of...say...1Gb per square inch(hard drives have areal densities of greater than 50Gb per square inch [pcworld.com])...and if my math is correct, approximately 400 square inches per side, that would be about 800Gb(100GB) of storage in a medium that may very well be incorporated into your screen's chassis. Depending on the level of vibration and the thickness of the enclosure, this would be an interesting technology for the next
      • I don't get 100 gigs of space, when I calculate it, I get 2500 gigs of space.

        400 square inches X 50 Gb per square inch / 8 bits per byte = 2500 GB.

  • This is good why? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by iainl ( 136759 )
    I don't know about you lot, but my LCD monitor is an awful lot larger than my hard drive. Surely all those extra heads are going to be really expensive, too?

  • Size of an LCD? (Score:5, Funny)

    by NemosomeN ( 670035 ) on Monday November 08, 2004 @10:17AM (#10754474) Journal
    Which one? The one on my watch, the one on my cell phone, the one on my calculator, or the one on my laptop?

  • Grammar (Score:4, Funny)

    by meabolex ( 788745 ) on Monday November 08, 2004 @10:18AM (#10754482)
    I wrote a this piece on Techworld about it.

    That really makes me want to go read the article.

  • I'm shaking mine right now (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 08, 2004 @10:18AM (#10754486)
    It seems to be wor
    • I used to use an old IBM with a card mounted hard drive. If anyone turned off the computer the drive would seize up and fail to spin. I'd have to crack the case, pull the card and give it a few good rotating snaps to eliminate the stiction. This was one case where shaking the drive was a -good- thing.

  • Piezoelectric (Score:5, Informative)

    by JaxWeb ( 715417 ) on Monday November 08, 2004 @10:18AM (#10754494) Homepage Journal
    I've recently being doing a report for Physics on the Piezoelectric effect, and it is really interesting thing.

    When you put a current through a piezoelectric material (e.g. Quartz), it vibrates. The oscillations are used to create sound in Ultrasound Transducers, and they are used in watches as a time measurement.

    Conversely, if you mechanically compress a piezoelectric crystal, a charge will occur at the edges. This is used in Ultrasound to detect sound waves, in guitar pickups, and even in those cigarette lighters in cars.

    You can read more about it at Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piezoelectric

    Just thought this might interest someone.

    • Re:Piezoelectric (Score:5, Informative)

      by ajlitt ( 19055 ) on Monday November 08, 2004 @11:25AM (#10755275)
      Right. Except the bit about the car lighters. Car lighters have a spiral of bimetal (a clad strip of two metals with dissimilar thermal expansion characteristics, see inside an old mechanical thermostat) that heats up as a circuit is completed between the center pin (12V) and the housing of the lighter socket. When the bimetal reaches a certain temperature, the bimetal spring twists and releases the pushbutton mechanism of the lighter, breaking contact with the 12V pin.

      Piezoelectrics are used in grill ignitors and 'electronic' lighters. They all use the same principle: Basically a piezoelectric material is put at the business end of a small hammer mechanism (much like a center punch) that strikes after a certain amount of pressure is applied at the button. Since the voltage at the edges of a piezoelectric material is proportional to the change in pressure, the quick blow produces a high voltage spike. That spike is fairly low current, but above the breakdown voltage of the air between the two contacts in the igniter.

      Interestingly, these lighter modules are great fun for zapping people. Since it's a low current, there's really no danger to using these. It's much like a static shock.

      One nifty application is in electronic buzzers. While that in itself may not be very inspirational, the actual design is pretty slick. Many fixed-frequency buzzers use a piezo elememt that has a small 'island' in the conductor along one pole. That island of conductive material is connected to a third wire. This wire is used as feedback to the oscillator driving the buzzer. What happens here is that you have the speaker (the majority of the element) and a separate microphone in the same substrate, enabling you to get a consistent tone by forcing feedback through the element itself! Since the peak volume of the buzzer is achieved at the resonating frequency of the element, this scheme locks the buzzer to the loudest tone it is designed to emit without any tuning of any sort.



      Also, check out some info on the 'net on the use of piezoelectrics in: SAW filters (surface acoustic wave), fuel injectors, crystal oscillators (not just for your Timex!), angular rate gyros, and micromanipulators such as scanning tunneling microscope heads.

    • Re:Piezoelectric (Score:2, Interesting)

      by zijus ( 754409 )

      More of FYI...

      When you put a current through a piezoelectric material (e.g. Quartz), it vibrates.

      As far as I remember a detail is: when you apply _variable_ current, piezoelectric material will vibrate.

      I worked during a training period with accelerometers. Basically those are a bit of piezoelectric material connected to an oscilloscope (to make it simple). The sensitivity of those devices is quite simply mind blowing. Put 10 m between you and your experiment table, just move you arm and observe the

  • I could open a cheap hotel/data center with vibrating magic finger beds/harddrives! $$$$

  • Whats it sound like? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Kenja ( 541830 )
    Does this mean it will make a buzzing noise rather then a whine?

  • WTF? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by general_re ( 8883 ) on Monday November 08, 2004 @10:19AM (#10754505) Homepage
    This is surely the most useless article I've seen posted here in some time, and that's saying a lot, considering we're just out of election season. The article doesn't tell you anything significant about how it works, the company's website [dataslide.com] consists of two press releases that don't tell you jack shit, so how about it folks - someone want to fill in a poor /. poster by telling me how this ------- thing works?

    • Simple! (Score:3, Funny)

      by tod_miller ( 792541 )
      Release a rumour, have some 3rd party effect, then fade away.

      Just take it from infineon, SCO and now kodak, it works!

      Anyone see a patent for this anywhere? Sounds really stupid to me, and I keep thinking of any obscure religion that has April 1st today (because of diff. calendars etc.)

      Well I can imagien it will take as long as it has taken platter technology to give us these capacities and speeds right? So maybe in 10-15 years we will use these vibro-storage devices.

      I can see a porn tie in somewhere her

    • Re:WTF? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Wyatt Earp ( 1029 ) on Monday November 08, 2004 @10:26AM (#10754571)
      I think this works by someone with a nothing story putting a link to it here and so people click through and huzzah! Hits come a rolling.

      And wow, that is a poorly written article too.

      "For lovers of irony we might note that this feature is about shaky technology. But don't knock it. Hummingbirds hover, they hang in mid-air, because of their vibrating wings. The apparently impossible can happen. A violin's shaking strings produce music. "

      It was like, shaky...humm, Word Thesaurus, give me shaky words to use and I will use them all in my closing.
    • I winder if CDROM drives and HDD can benefit from multiple lasers which themselves use a scanner like hexagonal reflector to rapidly scan 5/6 tracks of the cd, and you have about 100 lasers reading, then you can cut down wait time like this?

      Isn't this like building a scanner with two scanning heads? (and uses a different type of light source?)

      I guess we are all wondering, what is the storage medium, what is the non-volitile medium that we can all trust our data on.... and can it be corrupted using off the
      • Most of us are still using magnetic hard drives, so a laser (and especially multiple lasers) might have some unintended effects.
        • Man, you should buy one of there new fangled cdrom machines, or a deefeedeee, they are so cool, I am not sure what they have to do with computers but my friend, Alan, who is a l33t hacker, he showed me how to put them in microwaves and stuff and use them as very bad frisbees.

          One day...
      • I winder if CDROM drives and HDD can benefit from multiple lasers which themselves use a scanner like hexagonal reflector to rapidly scan 5/6 tracks of the cd, and you have about 100 lasers reading, then you can cut down wait time like this?

        I'm trying to picture such a device, and I can't get past the question of whether you're mounting multiple lasers on a single shark, or are using multiple sharks.
    • This is surely the most useless article I've seen posted here in some time, and that's saying a lot, considering we're just out of election season. The article doesn't tell you anything significant about how it works, the company's website consists of two press releases that don't tell you jack shit, so how about it folks - someone want to fill in a poor /. poster by telling me how this ------- thing works?

      It works by generating a "scientific article" and discussion in order to attract investors.

      I call i
    • This didn't work because you broke the rules man!

      I quote from your comment. The article doesn't tell you anything significant about how it works...

      And here is your sig. Proudly posting without reading the article since 1998!

      Obviously the new and improved /. code realised you subconsiously were trying to avoid the article. It went ahead and slashdotted the real servers on your behalf and then placed a fake article in it's place so you wouldn't be disappointed.

      Moral of the story: Sig. and actions mus

    • The article doesn't tell you anything significant about how it works...

      Proudly posting without reading the article since 1998!

      Liar!

  • Meh... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by krymsin01 ( 700838 ) on Monday November 08, 2004 @10:20AM (#10754512) Homepage Journal
    While I appreciate innovation, I think companies should really try to improve the current state of solid state storage devices. Obviously, no moving parts mean fewer points of failure. Also, other than saying that these devices could theoreticly be better than current spinning disks and flash memory, this article is pretty scant on hard specs about the tech. I guess it's way too early for them to release such information, but I'd like to see some specs on it. Like how they are going to cancel out background noise vibrations. Seems to me like this technology would be very exposed to faults due to things like that, perhaps even small vibrations due to loud noise/etc.
    • Well, watches and some other things work on the same approximate principle, or so I'm told, and they deal well enough with movement. And in fact severe shocks as well. Usually when an analog watch breaks, it's the gears and stuff, not the actual quartz-driving mechanism.

      I'm sure it's a concern since drives based on this technology would have to be way more sensitive than a watch. But it would probably also be vibrating way, way, way faster, so comparatively low-frequency interactions might be easier to

    • Am I the only one who thought of the Dilbert where he (Dilbert) was running Voice Recognition software and Wally was saying how it would be a shame if the software decided to "CLOSE ALL WINDOWS" and "REBOOT," or something of the like.

      Now, Dilbert might not even have to be running Voice Recognition software for Wally to perform...
    • In the old days (pre 1970) they made some hard drives on rotating drums with an array of fixed heads, maybe 128 of them. As the areal density increased, it became impractical to construct that many heads, so they switched to moving heads. Ever since then the research has focused on improving the moving head assembly.

      I've been wondering about a fixed array of hundreds of heads, conceptually one per track, hardwired and switched electronically rather than moved mechanically. The cost of a head assembly i

  • The real question: why? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Meostro ( 788797 ) * on Monday November 08, 2004 @10:20AM (#10754514) Homepage Journal
    A 'hard drive' could be the same size and shape as an LCD screen

    Personally, I prefer my harddrives to be less than 12 inches square... (12x12 = 17" diagonal)

    I could see this as possibly useful for a slim computer/tablet sort of thing, but I'd imagine that I could get more oomph out of a slim computer with a 0.25" thick CF card.
    • Of course, one might take into consideration that monitors are generally not square, but a 4:3 ratio (ever notice that resolutions aren't squre?). A 17" LCD monitor is roughly 13.6"x10.2".

  • LCD HardDrive?? (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    So instead of getting bad sectors i'll be getting burnt pixels.... Great

  • Solid State Drives (Score:3, Interesting)

    by hsmith ( 818216 ) on Monday November 08, 2004 @10:21AM (#10754524)
    The costs of these need to be cut down some more. I could care less about differnet types of "movable" disks.

    once we get these, almost-instant boot, awesome read times, then we will get rid of another bottle neck

  • An engineer (Score:5, Informative)

    by flowerp ( 512865 ) on Monday November 08, 2004 @10:22AM (#10754534)

    The signal processing done to the analog signal from one read/write head is tremendous. The performance of modern hard drive comes from the signal detection algorithms and advanced error correction that is performed.

    You simply cannot do this at low cost when you have got several thousand or million r/w heads.

  • Seems like a old storage drum that doesn't spin (Score:5, Insightful)

    by shoppa ( 464619 ) on Monday November 08, 2004 @10:25AM (#10754555)
    Before we had disks (I'm talking about the 1960's), the ultimate in storage was the drum. It was a few feet long, spinning at hundreds to low thousands of RPM, and usually with fixed heads (a few dozen to a few hundred, typically).

    This "new drive" seems to have all the disadvantages of a drum, plus another: it doesn't spin. Instead it just shimmies back and forth.

    Well, maybe the new magical material will handle this OK. With the old drums, spinning them up often took several minutes because of the huge inertia (weight was often in the hundreds of pounds for the bigger ones... disaster when the bearings seize and the drum smashes through brick walls!)

    • That drum had a head per track, and the biggest problem was starting and stopping, as the heads tended to mar the drum surface eventually destroying it. We had one that spun in helium to dissapate the heat, and keep the air friction down. We also had a head per track disk (2 surfaces). As the disk heated up it expanded, so the heads were mounted on some wierd mechanism to allow them to track the data. Man the 70's were fun. Average access time was about 6 ms. Booting was instant anyway though, we had m
    • Finding the drum after it has smashed thru the brick walls.

  • It's interesting, but won't improve anything. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Artifakt ( 700173 ) on Monday November 08, 2004 @10:26AM (#10754575)
    The idea seems to be that a vibrating sheet could move, while a grid of read/write heads could stay in place, just so something moves to generate a changing magnetic field. While that's certainly true, a spinning disc could also have mutiple heads per arm, multiple arms per disc, and so on. Getting a closely packed array of read/write heads is an equal challenge in either case, and having the surface move continually in the same direction is much easier than having it oscillate.
    This would affect what shapes a drive could be manufactured in, but that's unlikely to matter enough to make the idea catch on.
    • If the heads don't have to move you eliminate a whole crapload of equipment that manages them, including the strong magnets and voice coil, armatures, and the little pads the heads live on. Assuming you have a clever way to keep the heads and media separate it sounds fairly promising to me. The heads could probably be created through some sort of lithographic process, or maybe sprayed from an inkjet for all I know. I suspect however that in order to get useful sensitivity they will have to be pretty delicat
      • Greg Ganger and the folks at CMU have worked on sled based MEMS storage devices which use nanotechnology combined with improved materials for higher density electromagnetic storage (like how hard disks work, except the media is on a moving sled). In Ganger's case they explored head motion but decided against it as the area required for equipment to move the heads exceeded the heads range of motion, resulting in reduced storage capacity.
    • Which actually brings me to an idea. What if the disc were instead a sphere, and moved within a 3d plane. You could have read heads at 3 axes, and perhaps some non-read strips where something would be used to rotate the sphere (assuming that it wouldn't be held in air by magnetic suspension and rotated in a similar way).

      Would you be able to store more data on a sphere than a single-platter disc? How about stability, as one has greater mass but perhaps better balance (no wobble).

      I'm not a hard-drive arch

  • my prediction (Score:2, Funny)

    by nomadic ( 141991 )
    A 'hard drive' could be the same size and shape as an LCD screen.

    I predict that within 100 years, hard drives will have twice the storage capacity, be ten thousand times larger, and be so expensive that only the five richest kings of Europe will own them.
  • Will my data be all ghosted? Like column 54 on my spreadsheet will show faint trails of what was on column 53?

    Who the hell wants a hard drive that big? What's the advantage here, is it more durable, longer lifespan?

    It still has mechanical parts to fail, and it sounds like they'd fail faster with all the shaking and tons of read/write heads.

    It sounds like something from the Bad Idea Jeans SNL sketch.

    • The read-write heads, being fixed, no longer require a large amount of support hardware. All of the heads will likely be integrated into a single component, and the heads are absolutely miniscule. They really are tiny things. Here [storagereview.com] is a document on storageworks detailing the technologies of the heads in use on hard drives today. Thin film is a common process for making hard drive r/w heads...

      There are also benefits to having a rectangular storage device, especially in the area of space savings (prototype

  • Cool (Score:2)

    by nizo ( 81281 )
    Now my computer can do the hamster dance across my desk when all the drives "spin up" (or would that be "shake up" now?)
  • If we're talking solid state disks (in which direction in my opinion this is pointing to), I'd rather see something like this [sgi.com] in my household :) As to the size of such a "vibrating" storage solution... well, if I don't see it, I don't mind, but I hope it won't cost too much, it won't need more power, it will have higher lifespan, and at least two of these seems highly unlikely (just pick :)

    All in all, just let them boil a bit, let's see what comes out. Yup, one more thing, hopefully one will be able to car
  • I can just imagine the racket this thing would make. As shake velocity increases to reduce seek time, so will the inertia of the object being moved. Your laptop would take on a life of its own, as it bounces across the desk like a thing posessed.

    • The device itself can be mounted on foam rubber, bushings, or whatever is necessary to prevent the vibration from making the laptop a mobile entity. Besides, if it vibrated slowly enough to make the laptop walk it would be useless; if anything it would vibrate across tilted surfaces like a pager :)

  • Not so crazy (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The idea isn't that crazy but don't hold your breath waiting to see it actually work either. This idea is a lot closer to pure research than it is to technical implementation.

    If you can change the vibration of individual molecules, you could end up with very high storage densities. I can think of lots of reasons why this wouldn't work but the promise is immense.

    While I appreciate the reference to "The Innovator's Dilemma", I think it is a complete red herring. This isn't going to be a 'disruptive techn
    • The whole "innovator's dilemma" is a load of bull anyways, at least as described in this article.

      Just suppose for a minute that this WAS a feasible way to do things. I can just imaging Western Digital or Seagate jumping all over this if they thought that it has promise. Those companies are in the business of providing storage. Please explain to me why they would not want this, assuming that they were the ones to develop it. The deliver a box that stores a lot of bits at low cost. Why should they care

  • Bubble memory (Score:2, Interesting)

    by madaxe42 ( 690151 )
    This sounds rather like core memory, which was abandoned rather a long while ago, due to storage devices vibrating accros rooms. Obviously, the new devices are a lot smaller, so the vibrations will be equally smaller, but surely still damaging to the hardware.

    On a slightly unrelated note, I remember a story I heard of an old stack of 20" platters which used to walk across the room when under heavy load, and unplug themselves!

    • Re:Bubble memory (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Linker3000 ( 626634 )
      "I remember a story I heard of an old stack of 20" platters which used to walk across the room when under heavy load, and unplug themselves!"

      This happened where I used to work in the mid 1980s - a 256MB 12" stack on our VAX 11/750 was being confidence tested by a DEC engineer, but he'd forgotten to wind the feet of the unit down onto the floor - the unit started to shoot forward from between the other rows of system units, like a 100m sprinter making a false start, and the two of us dived across the room
    • Uhm- Ferrite Core memory [thefreedictionary.com] vibrated along the plane that they were magnetized in. Most of them were installed in vibration isolation enclosures. Of course, computers weighed a freakin' ton then, and did not tend to walk. They worked by hard magnetizing beads or toruses of ferrite (think iron) [computerhistory.org] All that said, I think the focus needs to be on the head structures. Now I was reading the discussion, and wondered about the application of the piezo sheet concept as the head to a drive instead of the drive itself
    • This sounds rather like core memory, which was abandoned rather a long while ago, due to storage devices vibrating accros rooms.

      Core memory consisted of an array of small magnetic toroids in which data was stored as the direction of magnetism in each of the toroids. I used to have an IBM 16 kbit Core memory card that was the size of an A4/8.5" x 11" piece of paper. It was abandoned because solid state memory was a lot cheaper, denser and used much less power.

      Core memory is completely motionless so I'm
      • abandoned rather a long while ago

        Actually, they were used in the shuttle until quite recently.

        • This is a funny one that is really more of an urban legend. I don't know where it started, but it is false, the shuttle has never flown with core memory in it; they have always used Rad-Hardened TTL and CMOS SRAM.

          I used to work with IBM FSD (and I've done Failure Analysis on Two AP101's memory cards that were on shuttle flights) so I can state this with some authority. I wouldn't be surprised if core memory has never been in space - it wasn't used in Apollo or Gemini (IBM SLT for the flip flops used in b

  • Huh??? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Pedrito ( 94783 ) on Monday November 08, 2004 @10:48AM (#10754823)
    First of all, with so few specifics in the article, one is left with speculating. Speculating tells me that a hard drive with a lot of heads is MUCH more expensive than a regular hard drive. The heads, and the mechanisms for controlling them are probably the most expensive part of a hard drive. So I would think and sheet like drive with a whole lot of heads and a mechanism for controlling the sheet is going to be ridiculously expensive.

    Of course, they might have a solution for this, but the post, the article, and the company's web sites leave so much unsaid, we may never know. My guess is we'll never see this. There are many other storage technologies that sound signifcantly more promising than this. And solid state still has a long way to go as well, and as a nother poster pointed out, no moving parts... Sorry if I don't leave a post-it note on my monitor about this one.

  • Sustainability and Progress (Score:3, Interesting)

    by base_chakra ( 230686 ) * on Monday November 08, 2004 @10:51AM (#10754848)
    From the article: Clayton Christiansen, a Harvard Business School professor, has coined the idea of the innovator's dilemma. If a successful supplier innovates it is generally to add features to and improve a product, but not to destroy it by developing radically better technology.

    I've often found it tempting to assume that if capitalism ceased to exist, so would this problem. I'm not asking "would it", but could it?

    For this thought experiment, I assume the scenario to be a moneyless society in which sustainable development is of primary importance.

    We also might assume that:

    1. New technologies aren't made available until they're put through the most rigorous field testing. Even if a project is shelved, the science is in itself regarded as a valued product which may be employed in future technologies.

    2. Our hypothetical society utilizes an established set of hardware standards at any given time. The relative universality of the standard is determined pragmatically.

    3. Compatibility with existing systems is always addressed as needed.

    4. An infrastructure exists to upgrade hardware as unobtrusively as possible when the need arises, rather than as a result of a psychological desire for the illusion of progress.

    This experiment is itself a "prototype", but I'm very interested in your insights. When thinking about techno-utopia and contrasting it with the real-life status quo, consider who's interests are being served in each case. I'm trying to envision a realistic scenario in which technological impact is healthy and sustainable.

    In this case, the imaginary society roughly sketched above would almost certainly house an intricate bureaucracy, so our perceived technological evolution might actually be even slower in such a case. However, even if each technology's generation lasted longer, that doesn't inherently mean slower scientific progress, but slower techno-social change. Even in our society, of course, development and progress happen behind the scenes even if we don't see a marketed product. It's not entirely proper to evaluate the technology status quo as a whole based solely on what products we have chosen to engineer.

    But consider that all products have a social impact, that they're chosen for their desired impact, and that it's safe to assume that the impetus for their production is usually not socially-conscious in the long-term.
  • The last thing anybody wants here is an earthquake rewriting all of their data.
  • I can't wait to get one of these shaking, and therefore vibrating, babies in my laptop! Just make sure the shaking is perpendicular to the keyboard ;)

  • Official Size and Shape (Score:3, Insightful)

    by SuperChuck69 ( 702300 ) on Monday November 08, 2004 @11:05AM (#10754993)
    I can't take an article seriously that says, "...could be the same size and shape as an LCD screen"

    Do you mean the 1" LCD on the front of my phone or a 55" LCD TV?

    Look, mom, I can store 5KB or my etch-a-sketch!

  • Gee... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Mysticalfruit ( 533341 ) on Monday November 08, 2004 @11:05AM (#10755001) Homepage Journal
    I guess that dibert comic about the PHB shaking his "laptop" because it was hung will come true, though instead of rebooting the laptop it'll just format the harddrive...

    • though instead of rebooting the laptop it'll just format the harddrive...

      I'm pretty sure I can 'format' my current hard drive by shaking it vigorously, too.

  • There goes Energy Star (Score:4, Funny)

    by gearmonger ( 672422 ) on Monday November 08, 2004 @11:07AM (#10755049)
    Rotating something a fixed speed is pretty efficient. Shaking something, where you're constantly changing its velocity, isn't so much. What'll this do to power consumption?

    Can't we just get someone to finish dev on those little plastic cards they used on Star Trek? Those things held shitobits of data...holograms too!

  • Awful and vacant (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Dun Malg ( 230075 ) on Monday November 08, 2004 @11:38AM (#10755429) Homepage
    The article is totally content free, and reads like it was written in german, translated to french, and then translated to english. "I wrote a this piece on Techworld about it." Yeah, I can tell you "wrote a" this piece, pal. Next time cut the crap with butterflies and hummingbirds and tell us how the hell a piezo drive actually WORKS.
    • It gets worse. See the Dataslide [dataslide.com] web site. The site consists of a press release from 2002, a contact form, a "mission statement", and a content-free "background and possible applications" page. The home page has a title of "Untitled Document".

      They claim to have a patent application, but there is no "Dataslide" anywhere in issued US patents or pending applications. The only name on the site, "David Barnes", doesn't bring up anything relevant in patent searches, either.

      Piezoelectric actuators for disk

  • first MEMS-based drive? (Score:3, Informative)

    by sloth jr ( 88200 ) on Monday November 08, 2004 @12:24PM (#10755972)
    For a background on the technology, check out:
    http://yogi.pdl.cmu.edu/research/MEMS/ [cmu.edu]

    quote: "storage capacity of 1-10 GB of data in under 1 cm^2 area with access times of under a millisecond and streaming bandwidths of over 50 Mbytes per second."

    The research is about 5 years old. Because of constant seek times (the surface agitates in both x and y axes) and a kajillion heads, this is technology really designed to bridge EEPROM versus hard drive access times/throughput.

    Think 50 Mbytes per second isn't any great shakes? Keep in mind that this is a chip less than a square centimeter in area, and start thinking of replacing RAID drives with these.

    sloth jr

  • Problems - Heat generation (Score:3, Insightful)

    by nuggz ( 69912 ) on Monday November 08, 2004 @12:48PM (#10756268) Homepage
    Heat generation is one problem.
    you have to speed up and slow down the point several for every half cycle.
    This is a lot of energy, even assuming it is all on 'springs' you will get some mechanical loss due to friction.
    This will likely be much more heat and power consumption then a current rotating drive.

    What about the cost of many heads? Right now a hard drive is a small number of expensive heads, and a large area of cheap media. This could cause the cost to skyrocket.
  • Someday, they will perfect the rotary hard drive. This amazing device simply spins in one direction--the faster it goes the faster it wants to go.


    Once the valves (seals) can be manufactured precisely enough, and the real-world effeciency begins to approach the theoretical effeciency, we will all use them.


    Until then, we will have to live with the old reciprocating hard drives that try to shake themselves apart as they operate.

  • CRAM = Card Random Access Memory. It was a machine full of magnetic cards, each a bit bigger than a playing card, with a vacuum feed mechanism to load them (if you were lucky) to a drum for reading and writing.

    Used to be a feature of early NCR (National Cash Register, also known as No Computers Really) machines before disks were readily available.

    Its keys features were

    a/ It drowned out small jet aircraft taking off from the same room.

    b/ The cards would fail to feed frequently, making sure that the d

  • MTBF (Score:2)

    by Shotgun ( 30919 )
    I don't think these would be very power hungry as long as they are vibrated at the crystals natural frequency. It takes very little to keep an object vibrating at it's natural harmonic. What I see happening is an element that is constantly vibrating (ie, flexing) until it comes apart.

    Flexible AND resonant at high frequency takes a LOT of engineering.
  • ...what our problem is....

    We seem hell bent on making the drives spin faster rather than putting in more heads.

    Why not, for instance, put a triangle shaped series of head that has its narrow point towards the center of the disc and the wide end towards the edge. This would give you the same read speed at the center as the outter rim and if you made one big head (or a series of small ones more likely) the head would never move, thats less problems right there, the speed would be faster because instead of
  • Sounds pretty much like MEMS [cmu.edu]. Perhaps the author should check with these folks [ibm.com] to make sure they're not violating any patents...



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