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Hardware

Plastic Hard Drives 63

Posted by Hemos from the fun-with-new-prices dept.
Quite a number of you have written in with the news about Sony and Nippon Zeon Co Ltd announcing plastic hard drives. The current estimate is that it will cut production costs by 30-40%, on 5 gig drives. No word, however, on when production/testing will start.
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Plastic Hard Drives

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  • A few points:

    1 - Solid State HDs aren't new. I saw a review of one of the first ones in Boot about a year ago.

    2 - EEPROM is expensive and slow. That's why it's not used for solid state hard drives. Usually, PC100 SDRAM is used, with a battery pack and a regular magnetic hard drive. When the power goes out, the battery pack keeps the data in the RAM while the hard drive makes a copy of the data. Protection of data in a power outage is essential for these things because you generally only can afford and only need a solid state hard drive for a server. The ones Quantum makes can do sustained 30 MB/sec off the RAM and average seek times of 3 - The ones Quantum make [quantum.com] (the only ones I've seen, I don't work for Quantum) go up to 3.2 GB, although I'm sure the prices are all 5 digits.

    4 - Heat? The way hard drives are manufactured now, the aluminum is just the actual platter and doesn't carry any data. All the data is on an iron oxide coating. (that's why hard drive platters are yellow-orange) My understanding is that these new drives would be the same on the outside (metal casing) but use plastic instead of aluminum - plastic platters coated also with iron oxide. Even so, the main cause of heat in hard drives is from air resistance to the platter/heads over the platter, so the plastic might still be affected. Might be interesting to see what happens. I run 7200 and 10000 RPM hard drives and I've never had a problem with heat though. Warm to the touch, but not hot.

    Jonathan Wang

  • How many different fruity colors will these come in?



    ---
    Have a Sloppy night!
  • oh, does no one remember "My First Sony"?

    matguy
    Net. Admin.
  • I'm glad someone got the reference in the subject...
  • Well, it would spin up faster for the same input of energy. OTOH, it would have less inertia holding the RPMs steady. Friction might need to be significantly decreased. OTOH, with all the really small disks being announced these days, they *must* have solved that problem.

  • Will they have to pay royalties to Fisher-Price for this one?
  • Luckily, right now that bacteria can't survive without a lot of *help*. You know, special solutions, temperatures, other stuff. And even then, they don't last long.
  • Would the reduced mass (and hence lower wattage motors) of a plastic spindle mechanims off-set (to a limited extent) the poor heat disipation?

    Perhapse using a magnesium space frame skeleton that could double as a heat sink.....
  • Ever seen a floppy disk?
  • This will be great if two things happen. First, more platters in the same sized hard drive, which means an increase of capacity without signifigant cost. Second would be higher RPM speeds since the drives weigh less than their metal equivilents. I wouldn't mind a 10,000rpm EIDE hard drive. In UDMA 33/66 that would really fly.
  • The perfect companion to the ChiaMac [nationalgamereview.com] I would say... :)
  • My only concern with plastic platters is heat stability. If the platters get hot enough, it's quite possible the heat will bake the magnetic patterns off the surface (try cooking a magnet). It's probably a good guess that plastic conducts heat poorly (unlike aluminum), so that might be a problem (expecially if you discover your power supply fan died).

    Heh. Add beside "My hard drive crashed," "My hard drive melted" to the list of late homework excuses }}:-)

    What ever happened to glass hard drives? They're supposed to be heat stable (and create a very smooth surface - less heat).
  • Screw Fisher-Price, make my next HD a TONKA!

  • AFAIK the battery is only for the CMOS memory where the BIOS keeps config info; I've never lost the BIOS by pulling the battery.

    I've pulled EEPROM chips, carried them around, chewed on them (not hard enough to damage the case :) ), and put them back in to find that everything is OK. Unless there's an onboard battery (something that I doubt in the little 8-pin EEPROM for storing the program for a PLC I was playing with recently) the EEPROM retained data without power.
  • Screw IDE, gimme a 20k rpm u2w scsi drive, and some cheesy poofs. And make it big too. That would be nice, least thats where I hope they are going with these things.
  • I'm going to assume that platters are already made out of hi-tec plastics, but sony is just talking about putting a plastic shell around the electronics instaid a mettal one
    "Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
  • I wonder how many of these things would melt.
    Anyone knows that when plastic burns it emits a toxic gas. Perhaps it's deliberate.

  • I recall stories of glass platers floating around a couple years ago. They were to be lighter, faster and cheaper to produce. I even saw some proto-types in a materials engineering course. Whatever happened to this idea? Perhaps they didn't make enough noise about "market share" and "stock prices". Too bad development and investment go hand in hand.
  • Anthrax is not one of the bacteria that have this property.

    Sure, you were right, but the information was useless.

    Last I heard, they have found some strains of some Pseudomonas species that could break down some plastics and use them as food. Pseudomonas is a rather fun genus like this. There are species that can also use common soap, wood fiber (paper?), and even some detergents (with phosphorous) as food sources.

    However, they are also opportunistically pathogenic. This is not so much a problem because of the ability of causing infections in this case, but more because it means it is adapted to living inside the human body, ie: it requires a high degree of moisture and 37 degrees Celsius (98 degrees for us silly americans). As a side note, they probably would not react well to the iron on the surface of the disks.

    However, I suppose if you would keep the inside of your case at 37 C and 80% humidity, you might get a bit worried about this.

    Summary: I think there are better chances that your aluminum hard drive will spontaneously combust than a plastic hard drive getting eaten by bacteria.
  • EEPROMs do need electricity to keep their data stored, but they only need 1.1 volts and require very very low wattage so the little lithium battery you see on the motherboard (open it up and look, I promise you it's there somewhere) is enough for the BIOS et al to retain their memory.
  • SCSI is great, but for the low end IDE is more economical, maybe even FireWire if they can get the price down on the processors and SRAM inside them. Yes I know FireWire is a SCSI derivitive.
  • It's usually a good idea to *read* the article first, then reply to comments.
  • That would actually be pretty nifty if manufactures would make plastic cases as well as platters for hard disks. Then if you had it external, you could have a translucent case and see the read write heads flipping about as they do.

    Or if you had a clear computer case to start with.
  • Would I be able to put a magnet up to it?
  • I know that the cost of production of these plastic drives will be much cheaper as plasti c injection molding produces products much faster than metal. But how reliable will these drives be and how quick?
  • From the story: ``Sony has been promoting various types of hard disks with several partners, and it won't start investments until it becomes clear which technology is the best,'' said Masashi Kubota, an analyst at ING Barings. This seems to suggest to me that this is fairly early on, and it will be some time before we see these. Oh well, I have enough storage to last me quite some time. I find denser media more exciting than cheaper media.
  • I think either most of you are confused or I am (it's probably me.) I think that the hard drive case etc is plastic. Not the actuall platter. That wouldn't make any sense, because then platter needs to be metal in order for the heads to read/write data to it since it works by electromagntism. Maybe their just going to coat the plastic platters with some sort of metal coating. Would some one please set me straight here.
  • Lego Keyboards? They're Mac, but, I'm sure you could adapt:
    http://www.applefritter.com/compubrick/accessories /index.html [applefritter.com]

    [Wow, /.'s SLLLOOOOWWWW today.]
  • Check out Compubrick [applefritter.com] for some lego keyboards, among other things :-).

    ----
  • Will the heat generated cause degredation in the platter's ability to hold data? Will this also mean that drives will use less energy? Great for ploptops, eh? And since the platters could be lighter, does this mean faster rotation? I wish this article was a bit more complete...
  • Yes, the article is talking about making the actual platters out of plastic rather than aluminum. They will coat the plastic platters with a magnetic coating, just like they do now with the (non-magnetic) aluminum ones.

  • The platters are typically made of aluminim(sp) which is a very poor choice for holding a magnetic charge. The *coating* is an oxide material, which is a good choice. In fact, it seems that plastic may allow higher data densities because it will resist "bleeding" the signal. (please note that I am pulling this stuff out of my ass.) anyway, it seems to me that plastic platters would be lighter, spin faster with the same amount of power, spin up faster, and draw less power, and produce less heat. All "good things"



    The problem, in my mind, is the problem we always see with this stuff, WHEN CAN I ORDER ONE. There is never an answer. The tech industry it 85% hype. You may have noticed that the article talked more about stock prices than the technology. It is more about exciting stockbrokers than geeks.




    -Pete
  • The article mentioned talks between Sony and Castlewood systems. Castlewood Systems make the ORB drive. This could mean *much* cheaper removable media for the ORB or quite possibly ORB variants.

    I wonder if the current ORB drive could read a plastic disk?

    Also wouldn't platic platters be more durable?
  • That's right! Pick your size! I'll hand craft each one of them to your liking. I will soon be mass-producing them with a cutter and conveyor belt. Guaranteed to fit inside any computer!
  • I don't know how smooth a hard drive platter has to be, but some polymers can be smooth enough to work as eyeglass lenses, so that might be close enough.
  • HAH! I can use ICE and make sure the drives don't get too hot. They won't crumble to bits AND they never get dusty nor chip. Scratch your platter? Just shave off the top layer of ice and boom, you've reformated and made a new disc!

  • nope (Score:1)

    by quadong ( 52475 )
    No, see comment #14.
  • $20 for a 20 gigger? Sign me up!

    hehe... I think you meant $10 per gig, not $1 :)
  • There are bacteria that consume oil derivatives, right? I wonder if there's something that would eat the plastic in these drives. Heh.

    That would restore meanings to a "bug"...

    That might provide an interesting, if silly and slow, way to destroy one's data if being raided: smear it with a colony already growing on agar, and figure that they probably won't autoclave the disk...
  • EEPROM dosen't need power to keep data; its the same thing that your BIOS is stored on and that some digital cameras use. Unfortunately, last I checked solid-state disks were EXPENSIVE as heck!

    Probably a 'disk' using RAM rather than EEPROM would have much faster access times, but they require a battery during a power failure (not the place I'd store my important stuff).

    Oh - where'd you get a $20 20GB hard disk? I'm really hoping that wasn't a typo.

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