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Data Storage Hardware Technology

Hitachi Predicts 3D Hard Disks by Year's End 382

Posted by timothy from the denser-better dept.
daria42 writes "Hitachi has announced that its perpendicular, or 3D, hard disks should be out by the end of 2005." From the article: "Today, hard drives record and store data in a longitudinal fashion, with the read/write heads scanning over a horizontal plane. In perpendicular recording, data bits are aligned vertically, allowing for more data to be squeezed into a finite area. Put another way, data will go from being stored on a two-dimensional XY grid to living in a three-dimensional XYZ space."
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Hitachi Predicts 3D Hard Disks by Year's End More

Hitachi Predicts 3D Hard Disks by Year's End

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  • Either way. (Score:5, Funny)

    by Seumas ( 6865 ) on Monday April 04, 2005 @06:25AM (#12132067)
    Hey, I'm all for whatever works to get me these bigger (and eventually cheaper) storage drives. It's all a guy can do to keep track of drawers full of archived 200gb hard drives to organize his 2.5 terrabytes of porn. Hopefully we're only a few years away from being able to cram all of that, and more, into a single affordable consumer drive.

    • Hah (Score:2, Interesting)

      by davedx ( 861162 )
      I'm just amused this was modded as insightful.

      True enough I s'pose :P

    • Re:Either way. (Score:5, Funny)

      by atrizzah ( 532135 ) on Monday April 04, 2005 @06:41AM (#12132145)
      I don't understand your technological mumbo jumbo. Could you please convert your figures to Library of Congress sized units?
    • That's right. 640Gb should be enough for anybody.

    • Re:Either way. (Score:5, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 04, 2005 @09:08AM (#12132803)
      Yeah right. The 2.5 Tb of Pr0n is only the start. Then you need another couple of Tb for warez (or "legitimate backups of proprietary closed source software for which you have mislaid the original media" as it's known in the trade), one for your utterly worthless digicam pictures of your gimpoid loved ones, 100 years worth of pointless emails (complete with lame "joke" attachments) plus all that crap you've squirrelled away "just in case" but can't even be bothered to spring clean 'cause there's just too damned much.

      Add the same all over again for offsite storage and you get something like 3 Googlebytes (where a Googlebye is defined as the amount of stuff held by Goggle at some point or other in time)

      Hayzeus... How's a guy supposed to keep up ?

  • Believe it when I see it.... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by eggoeater ( 704775 ) on Monday April 04, 2005 @06:25AM (#12132069) Journal
    For 15 years I've been reading stories of new non-volatile storage. I rememer reading about holographic memory in 1989.

    Get back to me when it's actually a marketable, mass-producable product.

    • RTFA (Score:3, Informative)

      by jonr ( 1130 )
      Hitachi will actually come out with drives that employ perpendicular-recording techniques toward the end of this year...
      So, it looks like it is finally happening for real...

    • Also factor in.... (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Kjella ( 173770 )
      For 15 years I've been reading stories of new non-volatile storage. I rememer reading about holographic memory in 1989.

      Get back to me when it's actually a marketable, mass-producable product.

      Also remember that what was marketable in 1989 isn't marketable in 2005. To force a technology shift, you have to provide a superior technology, which is quite hard when the other is rushing ahead. Many other good technologies have fallen on that sword.

      Kjella
    • I remember that the Next Big Thing in hard drives was going to be perpendicular recording, back in 1982 when it was seen as the only way to get over 10,000 bits per inch. That was over 20 years ago, and *now* it's the wave of the future? What happened?

  • But when... (Score:3, Funny)

    by ArtimusArchmage ( 789937 ) on Monday April 04, 2005 @06:25AM (#12132071)
    When do I get my 4D Hard Disk?

  • Vinyl stores information in 3D (Score:4, Interesting)

    by millwall ( 622730 ) on Monday April 04, 2005 @06:26AM (#12132077)
    I'm tempted to say: "Nothing new move along"; but I appreciate that it's quite different when applied to digital media.

    Although storing information in 3D is nothing new, that's how you get music in stereo from a vinyl record.
    • Well, you could argue vinyl is still 2D. You have a distance along the groove and a "depth" in the groove.
      • Yep. You could also argue that stone tablets are 3D.
      • Yes but the record is spinning, thus providing you the third axis:

        Axis 1: Horizontal Groove
        Axis 2: Vertical Groove
        Axis 3: Time

  • I don't quite get it... (Score:5, Funny)

    by datafr0g ( 831498 ) <datafrog&gmail,com> on Monday April 04, 2005 @06:26AM (#12132078) Homepage
    Does this mean if I lie my computer on it's side, I'll get more HDD space?

  • Anyone know...? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by TLLOTS ( 827806 ) on Monday April 04, 2005 @06:27AM (#12132082)
    What kind of performance one could expect from a drive like this? Would it be any different from a regular hard drive, just with a heck of a lot more space, or would there be some tangible difference? I suspect there wouldn't be, but nonetheless while this seems rather promising I don't want to find that it packs some pretty heavy penalties for the storage.

    • Re:Anyone know...? (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Triddle ( 793231 )
      The data transfer rate would be around eight times faster...

    • Re:Anyone know...? (Score:5, Informative)

      by QMO ( 836285 ) on Monday April 04, 2005 @09:28AM (#12132964) Homepage Journal
      When the data density of hard drives increases the data transfer speed increases.
      Imagine one of the tracks on the platter. Suppose that the track contains 1KB. Further suppose that it takes .006 sec to spin that track past the read/write head (that's 10,000 rpm). This means that the data transfer rate from the track is about 1/6 MB/sec.

      Now, double the density of data on the platter. This would make 2KB in the same track, increasing the transfer rate to about 1/3 MB/sec.

      (Historically the read/write sensitivity, time required to convert the signal to true binary for the computer, and distance to controller card have been speed bottlenecks. However, I think that the current bottleneck is the data transfer rate from the platter to the read/write head.)

  • Not to be pedantic.. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 04, 2005 @06:28AM (#12132087)
    but havn't disks always had three "dimensions"? The track (x), cylinder (y) and head (z).

    Maybe I just don't understand the article. If the drive is still physically a bunch of cylinderical platters spinning and an armature that moves across the surface of the platters, all this means is the drive firmware has been re-written to use a different logical disc format. Big whoop.

    • Re:Not to be pedantic.. (Score:5, Informative)

      by mikael ( 484 ) on Monday April 04, 2005 @06:54AM (#12132200)
      Each bit on the hard disk is represented by a small area of magnetized particles (like lots of little bar magnets).

      With the longitudal system, the particles are magnetized so that the North and South are both on the surface of platter (bar magnets lie flat on the surface).

      ie. <N-S> <S-N> <S-N> <N-S> <N-S>
      With the perpendicular system, the particles are magnetized by a field that is perpendicular to the surface (bar magnets point up or down) ie.

      ^ ^ ^ ^ ^
      N S S N N
      | | | | |
      S N N S S
      v v v v v

      Obviously, this has the potential for increasing storage capacity.

      • Obviously, this has the potential for increasing storage capacity.

        I suspect it could also improve read/write speed. If the bits are stacked vertically, it seems that the read/write head should parse the stacked bits in parallel instead of the current serial fashion.

        Let's see if I can dodge the lameness filter...

        bit 0 ----\
        bit 1 ----\\
        bit 2 ----\\\
        bit 3 ----\\\\
        ---------read/write connection (electrical connection back to controller)
        bit 4 ----////
        bit 5 ----///
        bit 6 ----//
        bit 7 ----/

        To pr

  • I almost don't care anymore (Score:5, Interesting)

    by IronChef ( 164482 ) on Monday April 04, 2005 @06:29AM (#12132089)
    Current affordable hard drives are, well, pretty farking big already. I care a lot less about capacity now than reliability. I despise hard drives and look forward to the day when they are just a bad memory. (And I haven't even been burned badly, since I back up.)

    Give me a guaranteed 5-year lifespan on a drive, then you'll have my patronage... more gigs don't get my attention anymore.

    • Re:I almost don't care anymore (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Propagandhi ( 570791 ) on Monday April 04, 2005 @06:50AM (#12132183) Journal
      I'm most excited for applications in DAPs and cameras than anything else, and I think Hitachi has the same idea (at least I seem to recall seeing some press releases on a similar note). Current 3.5" drives have already hit the 500 gb range, so increasing their capacity isn't a significant priority as most consumers really don't have 500 gb of crap they need to store.

      What this tech is really useful is making really small (1") drives for next gen DAPs. Whereas the highest density Hitachi currently (or rather, will soon, I don't think these have hit the market yet) offers is 30 gb/platter (that's a 30gb 7mm thick, 1 inch HD or 60gb 10mm thick, 1 inch HD) with this tech they say they can get over 100gb. That'd be awesome for a DAP, as you'd finally be able to compress large music collections losslessy, or have an even smaller HD (say, 3/4") that has enough capacity for your whole music collection in a lossy format.

      Either way, I'm excited to see their next gen (or two gens away or whatever) HD and the DAPs that use them. Hopefully Hitachi fixes the reliability issues they've been having (I know the Hitachi drive in the Rio Karma gets a fair amount of press, although mine has never had problems)...
    • ...I have a second machine. I even got one 400km away I could back-up to. What I do miss is a simple automatic folder synchronization tool for Windoze (still my primary desktop). Better yet, with a virtual "WORM" capability. I.e. I'd donate 10 gigs there, and it'd keep like the 10 last copies of 1 gig here. No "remember to back-up" shit. Just do it live, password protected/encrypted.

      With that, harddisks are completely reliable *enough*. Maybe burn a DVD of pics every once in a while, the digicam ones are p
    • As someone mentioned, Seagate gives out 5 year warranties, on all but the "external" drives in Firewire or USB enclosures. Laptop, desktop and server drives are all covered by the same warranty length.
    • These drives are not always for the personal user. There are these groups called Governments and Companies. They often have the need for more storage. And with RAID Drives having ultra dependable disks is not as important then cheap disks that store a lot. If the drive is 1/2 the cost of the other more dependable drive and it lasts 2/3 as long as the dependable drive, then the company made a good deal. With a good hotswap disk storage array that is setup properly all they need to do is pop out the drive
      • There are these groups called Governments and Companies. They often have the need for more storage. And with RAID Drives having ultra dependable disks is not as important then cheap disks that store a lot.

        On what planet exactly? Traditionally Large businesses and governments have been the ONLY ones willing to pay more for more reliable hard drives. While it's true that RAID can improve the reliability of your storage solution it's not by any strech perfect.
    • You obviously don't do non-destructive video editing. My laptop's hard drive is 80GB, which is enough, and usually has around 15GB free. I have an external FireWire 800 drive I use for video editing. It is 320GB, and almost full. I would welcome being able to get a terabyte or two in the same space.

  • little difficult... (Score:4, Funny)

    by spectrokid ( 660550 ) on Monday April 04, 2005 @06:37AM (#12132118) Homepage
    how do I visualise this? Data in jelly blubber with a read/write needle swimming through it? Data gets read out where two laserbeams cross?

    • That's been done! (Score:3, Interesting)

      by IdahoEv ( 195056 )
      how do I visualise this? Data in jelly blubber with a read/write needle swimming through it? Data gets read out where two laserbeams cross?

      Actually, what you describe exists. There's a team that was making, a decade ago, transparent gelatinous cubes containing bacteriorhodopsin, a light-sensitive protein similar to the light sensor in your own optical rods in your retina.

      By indexing the cube with two different lasers simultaneously, you could cause the bacteriorhodopsin in an indexable 3D location to s

  • What is Perpendicular Recording Technology? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by pressesc ( 873084 ) on Monday April 04, 2005 @06:37AM (#12132122) Homepage
    This [pressesc.com] site explains the difference between perpendicular and Parallel recording technologies. By the way, all hard disks are 3D. The slashdot headline is once again misleading.

  • Terrible writeup. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Mike1024 ( 184871 ) on Monday April 04, 2005 @06:38AM (#12132126)
    I for one would like to say I think that writeup is terribly written.

    I say this because the writeup describes what 3D means bout four times, even though it's perfectly obvious from the first time it's said.

    When it comes to the important bit - how it will actually work - there is no mention of it at all.

    Are the heads going to detect things at multiple distances? Are these just going to be like multi-layer platters? Or is it going to be one solid block? How would that be read?

    The article would have been much better if it had cut out all but one of the descriptions of what 3D is, instead giving us some details on how this will actually work.

    Just my $0.02,

    Michael
    • As I read the article it isn't 3D at all, perpendicular merely meaning that the magnetic domains go perpendicular to the disc plane rather than parallel with the plane , and Hitachi just has an advancement in that (Toshiba has been doing it for a while anyway) rather than anything really distinctly new.

  • Extra space... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by kwoo ( 641864 ) <kjwcode.gmail@com> on Monday April 04, 2005 @06:38AM (#12132128) Homepage Journal

    Am I the only guy on the planet who doesn't seem to need more than about 80GB?

    My MP3 collection fits happily on my 20GB player. Every project I work on fits easily in my 20GB home partition. /usr is at well under 50% usage, and /var can probably handle the web logs for an average Slashdotting.

    Frankly, short of gratuitously downloading porn and leaving dirty copies of the Mozilla source tree lying about, how does one fill up the kind of space that one of these drives would make available (without running a server of some sort, of course)?

    • Re:Extra space... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Seumas ( 6865 ) on Monday April 04, 2005 @06:53AM (#12132195)
      You already nailed the porn angle, which can absolutely eat up almost unlimited quantitties of storage.

      You might be surprised at how much storage people require for their MP3 collections. Why, ripping just my collection of actual physical CDs that I personally own runs a couple hundred gig. Not to mention, if you backup your personal collection of legally owned DVDs to xvid, you could be using up a few hundred gig for a decent home collection.

      And aside from those uses, think about the incredible amount of data that builds up over time if you're an avid digital photographer taking medium to high quality photographs. Or if you are scanning the family photo albums. Or if you like to keep your paper records light, so you scan them and shred the physical copies of documents older than three or five years.

      Or if you make your own home movies or edit your band's music on your PC. Or if you're backing up the important data from all the machines in your own into a central location frequently.

      Damn, even just a handful of videogames will eat up hundreds of gigs after awhile. Act of War, WarCraft, Unreal Tourney 2004, and TotalWar: Rome each take up between about 3gb and 6gb.

      Granted, your grandmother and your youngest brother will probably not consume much space at all. But most geeks will - and in fact, as more tech becomes available to the world and actively used (like digital cameras have in the last few years), the average person will find that they need more and more storage.

      I really feel we're going to hit a terrabyte sized consumer drive within the next three years. And even that might not be enough. Game manufacturers are only now starting to distribute more games on DVD format. Remember when games used to ship on one CD? Then three, four, five and even six over time? Well, today they can fit it all on a single DVD. Give it a couple of years when they start making games with enormous quantities of animation, live-action, cut-scenes, music... and we start seeing games that come on two, three, four or five DVDs. Imagine a 30gb game!

      I might sound crazy, but a decade ago, a game that would take up more than a single 600mb CD seemed absurd.
    • You obviously haven't found the wonder of downloading movies ;-). For research purposes, of course...
    • If you do any sort of audio editing (think recording studio), you will quickly find yourself wanting more disk space. Quickly. Especially when working with multi-track recording, etc. We tend to keep several firewire harddrives laying around with different musician's "sessions" stored on them until we can make backups to DVD-R.

      Even home sessions can start chewing up diskspace rather frighteningly if you keep your raw audio tracks laying around (frequently when you don't have time to mix down).

      Also, a f
    • I have about 36GB remaining on a 160GB SATA HDD.

      Pre-configured virtual machines, stored CD images, lots of high-res graphics files (different content than what you think), quite a few installed games, development environments, service packs, multiple releases of development environment images.

      This is a server, of course. It runs my home stuff quite nicely. It needs a bit more RAM though, only 1GB at the moment, and that's simply not enough.
    • [galt@damballah music]$ du -sh .
      140G .
      [galt@damballah music]$ find . -name \*.flac | wc -l
      4794
      [galt@damballah music]$ find . -name \*.mp3 | wc -l
      4228

      I have at least another fifty CDs I've yet to encode because I'm out of space.

      I'll likely be looking to build a bare minimum of a terabyte over the next year, in anticipation of having some place to store digital video of my children once they're born.

    • Re:Extra space... (Score:3, Insightful)

      by bobstaff ( 313564 )
      I regularly run two applications that require large disk space.

      1. MythTV (a Tivo like software package) that needs about 1GB to record 1 hour of TV.

      2. Work related data storage (Met Radar Data), since I work at home sometimes I need the space to store quite a bit of that.

      On top of the applications, I like to RAID just about everything and backup critical data to secondary machines once in a while. I do this because backup technologies (Tape/DVD etc) have not kept pace with hard drives in terms of cost an

      • Re:Extra space... (Score:3, Informative)

        by FireFury03 ( 653718 )
        On top of the applications, I like to RAID just about everything and backup critical data to secondary machines once in a while. I do this because backup technologies (Tape/DVD etc) have not kept pace with hard drives in terms of cost and capacity and hard drives do fail from time to time.

        RAID is a good "continuation-of-service" solution (i.e. you stand a good chance of being able to continue using the system during a failure), but IMHO it's absolutely no substitute for a backup. For one, the RAID applie
  • So, does this mean that you have an "orb" that the head moves around on? I really don't see how we can do this without introducing MORE moving parts to break.

    They should really put their energy into something more solid (ie less movement). Reliability is most important. I don't care if I have 30TB of space if I have to replace drives every week.
  • I'm confused as to why they haven't shipped these disks already. Surely the technology was first announced years and years ago? Has GMR etc. head sensitivity really been that hard to improve?

  • Screw capacity, make em faster (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    While I recognize that Joe User is stashing more and more crap on his hard drive, it seems to me that disk capacity is increasing fast enough to keep pace pretty well, and prices are staying low. Hell, I just bought a pair of 200-gig drives the other day not because I needed them -- I still had over 100 gigs free -- but because they were cheap.

    Rather than increased capacity, I'd like to see improvements in the speed of storage, since it's still the biggest bottleneck in overall systems performance.

  • Imagine defragmenting one of these disks in XP (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Travoltus ( 110240 ) on Monday April 04, 2005 @07:00AM (#12132219) Journal
    Try defragging that whole 1 Terabyte or even large partitions of it.

    What sacrifices do you make to which dieties to ensure the power doesn't go out while it's in progress?
    • You shalt sacrifice fifty young bucks (or so) to your nearby Computer Shop Employee and he will bless you with an UPS. May your data be safe, amen.
    • What possible reason do you have to have a terabyte disk with a _SINGLE_ partition!? It takes long enough to defrag the 40 GB partitions on my drive! (Admittedly, a 7200 RPM ATA100, not SATA.)

    • What sacrifices do you make to which dieties to ensure the power doesn't go out while it's in progress?

      Well, first sacrifice to the power deity. That is, switch off everything except your computer. This includes everything in your neighborhood, too (yes, your neighbours will get angry on you, but then, it's sacrificing, so it should hurt you a bit).
      Then, sacrifice to the god of information. For example by burning one of your favourite book (books not available anymore work best).
      And of course, you have to

  • We already have 3 dimensions in a disk, rotation and position on a platter being 2 and the multiple platters being the third.

    From what I can make out, these drive will be the same as normal disks, but the data will be aligned like so:

    N
    | as opposed to N=S
    S

    All this means is that a single bit of data will take up approximately a third of the platter real estate and so you can probably squeeze about three times as much data on it.

    Anyway looks like the 80's are back, people are using 3D as a cool wo
    • Could have nice side benefits (just like all density increases). The platters will have to rotate at a lower radial velocity to achieve the same transfer rate.

      Why is this important to me? I can't stand those 7200RPM disks on the desktop. Too noisy. Tried to buy a 5400RPM SATA disk recently and figured, there aren't any on the market! This sucks.

  • Toshiba announced this last year (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Toshiba announced [computerworld.com] "perpendicular recording" technology in 2004 with a scheduled release Q2, not late this year or next year. With a much better description of how "3d" perpendicular recording works.

  • forget 3D (Score:2)

    by pohl ( 872 )
    Forget 3D, folks. The most remarkable bit of news here is how the bits will go from being "stored" to "living". Holy cow!
  • as in cylinder, sector & head?

  • Rubik's Cube (Score:2, Funny)

    by RandySC ( 9804 )
    It sounds like a cross between a hard disk and a Rubik's Cube:)

  • If the increase in access speed continues to lag the increase in capacity, then increased storage capacity isn't much good. After all, what good is it if I can store 50 TB of data if it takes two days to read it?
  • You always hear about forensic people being able to get at data that's been written over many times on a hard drive. I wonder if there's any way that could be built into a hard drive. Could you store multiple sets of data in the same place on the hard drive and reread it at different sensitivities, or however they recover overwritten data?

    Let me know, hard drive experts.

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