Slashdot is powered by your submissions, so send in your scoop

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Science Technology

Nickel Sensors Could Raise Hard Disk Capacity 198

Posted by timothy from the why-if-i-had-a-nickel-microsensor-for-every dept.
Makarand writes "Tiny filaments of nickel, thinner than a wavelength of visible light, acting as magnetic sensors may expand the storage capacity of hard disks many times. Although, technologies exist to increase hard disk capacity, reading data bits reliably from such disks has proven difficult because as data bits become smaller their magnetic fields are weaker and difficult to pick up. Nickel filaments are capable of picking up of these weak magnetic fields using a phenomenon called "ballistic magnetoresistance" which is not completely understood. As the sensors are only a few atoms wide the electrons travel along a straight line in the conductor greatly enhancing the binary signal picked up from the data bits. These sensors could also be used to detect biomolecules in low concentrations."
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Nickel Sensors Could Raise Hard Disk Capacity More

Nickel Sensors Could Raise Hard Disk Capacity

Comments Filter:

  • Bloody hell. (Score:3, Funny)

    by caluml ( 551744 ) <slashdot@spamgoe ... minus herbivore> on Sunday February 02, 2003 @05:35PM (#5211743) Homepage
    Tiny filaments of nickel, thinner than a wavelength of visible light,

    Is it just me or are we getting too clever? :)
    Soon we'll be storing gigabytes on a single atom...

  • Spin states (Score:4, Informative)

    by SirCrashALot ( 614498 ) <{jason} {at} {compnski.com}> on Sunday February 02, 2003 @05:36PM (#5211750)
    That depends on how many spins an atom can have at once:) Welcome to the world of quatum mechanics.

  • Is it wise ? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 02, 2003 @05:38PM (#5211761)

    To store critical (or any data of some value ie: not junk) data on technology that is so vunurable to external forces if the technology is so small/fragile ?

    wouldnt it be better to concentrate on more reliable rather than greater storage ?

    • Re:Is it wise ? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by TheSHAD0W ( 258774 ) on Sunday February 02, 2003 @05:44PM (#5211797) Homepage
      Actually, making this stuff smaller has made it LESS fragile, not more. Less weight and shorter distance from bearing points means less torque and strain. 5-1/4" HDs were quite fragile, but 2.5" laptop drives are very hardy. And just try causing a head-crash on a Microdrive.

      I suspect, if this technology ever makes it to market, it'll be in a package that keeps it nice and safe.

    • Re:Is it wise ? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by swordgeek ( 112599 ) on Sunday February 02, 2003 @05:48PM (#5211820) Journal
      Hmm. Several points come to mind.

      1) So what's so unreliable about current storage? Disks can and do eventually die, but so do ***ALL*** mechanical devices. The magnetic lifespan of a disk is not clearly the limiting factor in the life of a hard drive. Half of the drives I replace die as a fail to spin up properly--not something we like to see, but an indication that the short life of the magnetic states aren't the most unreliable part of a hard drive.

      2) I don't see any indication that this is 'fragile' technology, on the macroscopic scale. Sure the signals are smaller, but once you reliably detect them they can be amplified ad nauseum, and reliable detection is what this is all about.

      3) Large scale enterprise storage in our current realm of thinking, requires high speed access and high reliability, and does NOT involve single drives. Hardware RAID5, RAID 1+0, RAID 5+0 (I've seen it done!) etc. is the way to get high reliability and high performance. Having a single hard drive, even one that's 100% reliable, isn't a reasonable storage solution for mission critical data, and so consequently there's not a lot of demand for a 100% reliable hard drive.

      • Re:Is it wise ? (Score:2, Interesting)

        by anethema ( 99553 )
        Maybe that says that we should be concentrating on fast solid state storage rather than trying to minimize the stuff we have now. Hard drives are currently the slowest and most unreliable equipment in our PCs today. Sounds like thats the bottleneck scientists should be working on.

    • Re:Is it wise ? (Score:5, Funny)

      by Waffle Iron ( 339739 ) on Sunday February 02, 2003 @06:31PM (#5212038)
      To store critical (or any data of some value ie: not junk) data on technology that is so vunurable to external forces if the technology is so small/fragile ?

      There was a brief time a few decades ago when the essence of my entire being was contained in a single molecule, with no backups! Luckily, I made it through that episode relatively unscathed.

      Ever since then, I've been making backups like crazy.

      • Re:Is it wise ? (Score:5, Funny)

        by shogun ( 657 ) on Sunday February 02, 2003 @07:05PM (#5212181)
        There was a brief time a few decades ago when the essence of my entire being was contained in a single molecule, with no backups! Luckily, I made it through that episode relatively unscathed.
        Ever since then, I've been making backups like crazy.

        I'm yet to make any fully redundant backups myself as opposed to your incremental ones, however I fear there may have %50 data loss in any such backups and the data space will have to be shared with someone elses.
      • Amusing, yes, but not entirely accurate. At best you were contained in 46 molecules, each chromosome being a separate DNA molecule. Actually, you were never less than a single cell, made up of a very large number of molecules, including complex structures like mitochondria which are critical to cell function but do not appear to be coded for in regular DNA.

        I'd like to take this opportunity to thank my mother for my mitochondria, and to thank my wife for providing my kids with mitochondria, since Dad and I (and males in general) can't be bothered with such picky little details...

  • Huh? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 02, 2003 @05:38PM (#5211764)
    Tiny filaments of nickel, thinner than a wavelength of visible light

    Then how do we know they're there?

  • Ballistic? (Score:4, Funny)

    by TheSHAD0W ( 258774 ) on Sunday February 02, 2003 @05:38PM (#5211766) Homepage
    I dunno... First we had giant magnetoresistance, then colossal magnetoresistance... Ballistic just doesn't seem to fit. We should call it gargantuan magnetoresistance, or Herculean... I know! Let's call it "humongous magnetoresistance"!

    • Re:Ballistic? (Score:3, Funny)

      by iomud ( 241310 )
      I vote for ludicrous magnetoresistance.
    • Using scanning electron microsopy (SEM) would be my guess.

    • Re:Ballistic? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by pacc ( 163090 )
      Ballistic doesn't refer to any new physical principle. It's the fact that the nickel layer is just a few nm thick that removes statistical properties such as resistance since there just aren't enough atoms in the thin layer for electrons to collide with, hence ballistic electrons. Prepare for ballistic transistors when they grow sufficiently small.

  • I hope IBM don't have anything to do with this... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Zog The Undeniable ( 632031 ) on Sunday February 02, 2003 @05:40PM (#5211779)
    ...as I had the first HDD failure warning this evening on my "auto destruct after 12 months" IBM 60GXP. I wouldn't mind so much if it had been hammered, but it's in a PC that gets used about twice a month. Does 99.9% of the population care less about the availability of 200GB hard drives? Surely the priority should be data security, then speed (it's the biggest bottleneck in your PC), then capacity?

  • Advances in storage technology (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Karamchand ( 607798 ) on Sunday February 02, 2003 @05:40PM (#5211781)
    Where and when will I - a normal consumer - be able to notice all those fantastic advances, like pixie dust, nickel filaments etc.? Sure, I notice a nice increase in storage capacity, a decrease in cost (and a warranty decrease;) - but nowhere I can see fantastic, large changes!

    • Re:Advances in storage technology (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Cali Thalen ( 627449 ) on Sunday February 02, 2003 @05:47PM (#5211815) Homepage
      Computer evolution is starting to look like biological evolution (sorry to all the Creationists...)

      Back when computers were akin to our old 1-cell relatives, it didn't take much to have a serious jump in usefulness. But now that they (and we) are vastly more complicated, significant improvements in individual aspects of the technology don't seem to affect the whole system as much, so they seem so much less exciting.

      As I see it, progress is going to be coming more and more in small steps, taking much longer to affect a huge change.

      But please, feel free to prove me wrong, I'd love to see the kind of jumps in usefulness that compters experienced back in the 80's.

      • Considering our knowledge of the universe is expanding exponentially, I'd be willing to bet computers will still see an exponential growth in speed until we hit the nanotech level, then as we learn new methods of organizing structures at taht level and develop new methods of programming, we'll continue to move along at a steady rate of increased usefulness.
      • Computer evolution is starting to look like biological evolution (sorry to all the Creationists...)

        What do you mean?
        On the sixth day (1986), God created a computer in his image.

        The Amiga.
    • You probably haven't noticed because not only are capacities going up, costs are going down as well. That 200 gig hard drive is selling for less money than 200 meg drives were when they first came out. The capacities are becoming so enormous that they're threatening to become meaningless; most computer users wouldn't know the difference between a 60 gig drive and a 20. (They might not even know where to look to find out which they have, for that matter.) As a result, companies are spending as much of their resources on dropping prices as they are boosting size.
    • If you haven't seen the advances then you haven't been looking. The recent sudden jump to hundreds of gigabytes on the cheap, for instance, is AFAIK the result of this [ibm.com] IBM research. Yes, that article talks about 16.8 GB drives but that was just the first one available under that technology; I believe it is used in all high-capacity drives now.

      There is no real marketing benefit to describing the real tech behind such devices, only assigning them buzzwords and hyping them up, so you only see stupid buzzwords.

      The computer industry is actually very good about getting major advances in the hands of consumers on a time scale measured in months after the practical advances are made.

  • New HD technology! (Score:4, Funny)

    by apoc.famine ( 621563 ) <apoc.famine@g m a i l . com> on Sunday February 02, 2003 @05:41PM (#5211784) Journal
    If I had a nickel for every time...

  • Of course (Score:3, Funny)

    by mccalli ( 323026 ) on Sunday February 02, 2003 @05:42PM (#5211789) Homepage
    The more nickels you apply, the higher capacity hard drive you will get.

    Phhh. I knew that and I'm not even American...

    Cheers,
    Ian

  • the speed? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Sophrosyne ( 630428 )
    How much slower will hard drives be? Or will they get faster? ...it just sounds slower to me,
    Shouldn't more reasearch be made into solid state memory? I'm not a big fan of hard drive noises and grinding... but hey any research is good research :)
  • using a phenomenon called "ballistic magnetoresistance" which is not completely understood

    Now the term "going ballistic" has a whole new meaning!

    This sounds cool though, sounds like Moore's law will keep moving along...

  • New sensation (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Autonymous Toaster ( 646656 ) on Sunday February 02, 2003 @05:46PM (#5211810) Homepage

    Chopra said the sensors also could be used to detect biomolecules, even in low concentrations. Each organic molecule could have its own fingerprint in terms of affecting whiskers' voltage.

    Though the data storage application could certainly serve to fund the development and popularisation of this technology, it seems possible that in the long term the quoted "secondary" application may actually be the primary one. If the device can be tuned to detect virtually anything, it has obvious applications in industrial processes, bomb detection, and so on. This is incremental to existing efforts in these areas.

    However, if it can be further trained to distinguish, it essentially amounts to an electronic "sense of smell". This is very exciting and has innumerable applications, especially in combination with other sensor devices and realtime feedback mechanisms involving both software and hardware.

    A hypothetical consumer application might be to control the temperature that a bread product is grilled at, bringing it to a perfect (and user-selectable) stated of brownness, while turning down the heat in individual spots at the slightest hint of burning. Wonderful development

    • "A hypothetical consumer application might be to control the temperature that a bread product is grilled at..."

      How fitting that you should mention that, given your nick. :-)
  • The article says nothing about writing data at such high densities. Something about this invention reminds me of the chip in the Terminator's head....

  • Cool.. (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 02, 2003 @05:50PM (#5211829)
    "ballistic magnetoresistance"

    Last time a drive failed on me, I made it go ballistic too, and it offered little resistance (however the concrete offered considerable resistance). Is this a similar thing?

  • It works, but they don't know how. Looks like a recipe to future problems.

    If this works, in a production environment when it exposed to certain radiation, radio signals, heat/cold, etc it not, will be dangerous to rely in that kind of things.

    "It's Magic!" is ok for childrens, but not if you want do to something serious.

    • "It's Magic!" is ok for childrens, but not if you want do to something serious.

      I hereby declare this technology sufficiently advanced!

  • Doesn't matter (Score:2, Informative)

    by CedgeS ( 159076 )
    Spontaneous flipping still poses an upper limit to magnetic data storage capacity. Basically, if you cram lots of bits too close together, they will start flipping each other.

    see: http://domino.watson.ibm.com/comm/wwwr_thinkresear ch.nsf/pages/frontier399.html

    under storing information for info on pushing this limit
    • PLEASE, take the time to make a link a link. It's really not hard, saves people time (and the frustration of the extra spaces in URLs) and it makes the world a better place*.

      The link is to:

      An article about IBM research [ibm.com]

      - Peter

      *hyperbole
    • Basically, if you cram lots of bits too close together, they will start flipping each other.

      Dude...that explains NY. Too many humans crammed together and they just start spontaneously flipping each other off.
  • The they figure out - Geez, you use a handfull of nickle and you can make enough nanosensors to supply the geek industry for a year...

  • What gets me.. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by di0s ( 582680 ) <<moc.liamg> <ta> <719tobbac>> on Sunday February 02, 2003 @06:03PM (#5211912) Homepage Journal
    What chafes my drawers is that fact that we're looking to increase capacity and not reliability. Isn't the average life span of a hard drive only about 5-7 years? What ever happend to solid state storage??
    • Reliability and capacity are largely interchangeable. That's what RAID is for...
    • Drives that last 5-7 years? Most drives are lucky to last even 3 years now. The question is, if data density doesn't increase will we have any reason to buy new harddrives before they fail? Someday we may just buy replacement drives of the same capacity regularly as old ones fail. Oh well.
    • Solid state storage is here today. I just built a silent PC... epia 5000 fanless motherboard, dc-to-dc (that's the brand, actually, as well as a description) fanless ATX power supply, solid state (obviously) ram, and solid state (http://www.satech.com/disonmoddom4.html was my provider) disk. total cost was about $300, including custom case, so there's no real argument about that, either. Performance is designed to fit my needs, not greatest possible. And I'll wager the thing lasts 50 years, given that it's in a fully sealed inert atmosphere, temperature never goes about 40 celcius, and internal humidity approaches zero. Oh yeah, and there's software which remaps around bad bits on disk or ram, so normal failures are acceptable there (although it may be forced to reboot if kernel memory is corrupt... fortunately, I'm using a fully journaling file system, not just meta-data journalling, so that, too, is okay). Total price, again, around $300, and reliability is quite satisfactory. What are people complaining about again?
      • Sorry about replying to myself, but it just occured to me. If people are interested in more info about this, send me an e-mail (adam at addaon.com). If enough people show interest, I'll write up an article. If not, I'll just answer questions as they come in. And to forestall the most common question -- it's not running linux.
      • Given that the flash drive that you purchased is only (according to the specs) rated for 1,000,000 write cycles, what makes you think that it's going to last even as long as a typical HD, let alone 50 years? Speaking of that, is using a fully journaled file system a good idea? That turns every write to disk into two writes to disk, effectively cutting your drive life in half. Also, with such a tiny HD capacity (how many 512meg modules can the drive hold? 4? 8?) what makes you think the machine will be useful in even 3 years, let alone 50? I suppose if you have a particularly specialized need for a 'solid state' computer, it would be useful, but not for a general-purpose machine.

        • Re:What gets me.. (Score:3, Interesting)

          by addaon ( 41825 )
          You hit the nail on the head. I have a specialized need. Capacity wasn't an issue; for various reasons, I'm using two 128MB modules, and that's all I need. On the other hand, the write limits don't really concern me. As I'm using custom software, I can trade off the number of write cycles in exchange for reliability. I basically limit it to a maximum of one write per location per hour, and start moving things around on the disk if a single section consistently gets more writes than that. Again, also, I can check after each write whether it worked; if not, I just mark that byte bad, and go to a reserved backup area. Assuming my usage patterns stay relatively similar, or even double, the number of write cycles shouldn't be an issue for roughly a century.

          Furthermore, I did destructive testing on a smaller unit (32MB) to get a sense of how accurate that 1M write cycle number is, since it did worry me for a bit. 1% of the write locations (byte sized) failed after 200k writes, going up to 2% at 500k, skyrocketing ;-) to 5% at 1M. Clearly not quite linear, but I'm not too worried. At 10M writes per location, 65% of locations were still writeable. Not ideal, I'd admit (that brings a 128MB disk down to ~83MB), but again, that would take a millenium with my usage patterns. (Currently, I'm reserving 16MB out of 128MB for repcing bad sectors. 16% bad sectors occured at around 4M writes.)

          So you're right in that this isn't necessarily feasible for a standard PC. On the other hand, with different usage patterns, you could easily just use a RAM disk. A good sized linux installation is reasonable in 2GB; this is under a thousand dollars in compact flash, with direct compact flash to IDE adapters. 2GB of ram, likewise, is only a few hundred dollars. On boot, make a ramdisk. Only write back to flash if you get nervous; or do it once an hour, and last a century. (Note also that most IDE drivers do bad sector remapping; it's not ideal, because it uses 512B blocks instead of the 1B blocks that flash actually fails in, but it's zero modification to existing code.) Needless to say, it would be more expensive than normal to build a computer this way, but it really wouldn't be off the scale.
  • that get's a little nervous about the idea that my data is accessed through a sensor 'only a few atoms wide'?
  • "As the sensors are only a few atoms wide" I wonder if they would dislodge/misalign if you dropped the hard drive by accident, or even moved it to fast.
  • Is 1 TB on my keychain for under $10, and all i want to know is how soon!??
  • Storage vendors seem to be obsessed with capacity, mostly to the exclusion of performance. I already have customers wasting 75%+ of their disk capacity so that they can spread their data over enough drives to get the performance they need.

    Microscopic $/MB is great, but only if you use all those megabytes.

    • Agreed. We only add storage to the primary Mktg/Fin Oracle server in increments of ~560GB to maintain our stripe width (and it's only 8). Since we're stuck with an EMC frame (prior decision and politics beyond my control) this means we only buy in $40,000 chunks.

      If you understand corporate accounting, you'll realize how badly this sucks... Making existing drives faster and more reliable is what I need - not bigger.

  • Quote:
    'a phenomenon called "ballistic magnetoresistance" which is not completely understood'

    Now, would you trust your data to a phenomenon that is not completely understood? I know I wouldn't
  • Ballistic Magnetoresistance?? Souds almost like technobabble; I had a funny thought that you could automatically generate alerts like this every six months using a random "new technology" generator.

    June 2003: Scientists have found they can dramatically increase hard drive capacity using *Ferrous Multipliers*!

    January 2004: Scientists have found they can dramatically increase hard drive capacity using *Quantum Isolators*!

    June 2004: Scientists have found they can dramatically increase hard drive capacity using *Magneto Flux Capacitors*!

  • Great, Just Freaking Great..... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Not The Real Me ( 538784 ) on Sunday February 02, 2003 @07:31PM (#5212280)
    I've got a bad 41GB IDE HD with bad sectors, a bad 30GB with bad sectors, a dead 20GB HD and a 60GB IDE HD that is acting irrational. I've also RMA'd three 30GB IDE HDs in the last year.

    The ironic thing is I've got five 5.25" full height 9GB SCSIs that are 10+ years old and they work PERFECTLY!

    Before increasing capacity, I'd rather see them increase RELIABILITY. I don't care what they specs say about MTBF. I want real world reliability because I am tired of restoring or having to recover failing drives.

    • The first 5.25" 1GB hard drive was introduced in 1994 (9 years ago). Your 9GB drives are no older than 6-7 years. They are certainly not 10+ years old.

      Any properly treated <= 10k RPM SCSI disk drive you get today will likely last just as long. Also, if it's still working after three years, it'll likely be working after six. You'll find almost all the defects in the first 18 months. It's should be no surprise that cheap IDE disks will be less reliable than the more expensive high quality SCSI disks. They're not just more expensive because of industry colusion. The extra quality costs more to manufacture. Considering that the upgrade cycle for x86 PCs has been less than 2 years for 5 years or so, can you blame the hard drive manufactures for being cheap when a very small percentage of their customers will care?

  • We need solid-state HD's! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Faeton ( 522316 ) on Sunday February 02, 2003 @07:35PM (#5212303) Homepage Journal
    We don't need more HD storage, realistically speaking. Unless you're doing some serious video editing/archiving the internet/archiving pr0n, the 180 gig HD's will do you just fine.

    What we do need is faster access/read times, and an easy way to get that is a solidstate HD. Not a huge amount of storage, maybe about 5-10 gigs worth. Enough to hold the OS and commonly used apps. With RAM prices as low as they are now, where are these things?! I want nano-second access times, not miliseconds! Imagine booting your computer in 3 seconds. Now that would be progress.

    • Well, if you want 3 seconds boot time, you'll need flash ram, not standard RAM, as they lose the info when you power off. (And no, always-on or UPS is not a solution. The day you trip over the power cord to your machine, it'll be CLEARED). It's not so cheap (at least not on the order of gigabytes), and in fact you do need some. Even a standard popular game like NWN easily eat up 2gb alone.

      As for corporate machines, they would probably rather boot their machines from a always-on server which can hold the most common programs in a ramdisk anyway, and simply take the penalty of loading them to ram from disk on the few occasions when the server reboots.

      Kjella
    • With RAM prices as low as they are now, why don't you just shove 4GB of ram into your home computer and let the OS data-cache deal with it.

      Nope, won't help your boot time -- but who reboots anymore? Laptops have uptimes measure in months -- even whey they're being carried around during the day.
    • Imagine booting your computer in 3 seconds. Now that would be progress.

      Bah. My Commodore 64 was doing that 15 years ago. And it used ROM. I've never lost my copy of the C64 OS.
    • "the 180 gig HD's will do you just fine". Well, go join an anime divx sharing channel. Or fire up a p2p app for a few months. I know people who have over a terrabyte of divx anime movies, and have to burn new stuff onto dvds to keep up. Sure, right now it looks like 10 terrabytes would be enough to hold all the video you could watch (just like a few gigs can hold more text than you'll ever have time to read in your lifetime), but by that time uses for that much space should become apparent.
  • I had a conversation a couple of days ago with a coworker about how to improve data density on CD's. One of the ideas I suggested was that instead of packing more bits onto the CD, why not colorize them? A red bit would mean one bit of data, yellow would mean another, and so on. That's just an example. It just seems like they could be putting more data on a disc by changing the way the bit is detected.

    It strikes me that there MIGHT be a way to do this in the magnetic world, but I really am not well informed on this topic. Who knows, maybe it's already being done. Enlightening information would be appreciated.

    I guess the real point of my post is that adding more density to the drives isn't the only way to increase storage.
    • There was some reseach into using 8 shades of grey instead of burning pits into a CD. Each bit became a byte, essentially.

      However, DVD-R already existed in larger sizes and had some sort of standard, so the tech flowed in that direction.

      Optical storage is following the same path as hard drives, though. Increases in rotational capacity (52x CD-ROM's), information density (higher wavelengths/tighter tracks) and finally alternate methods of storing the data itself, such as your idea.
    • You can't do this for modern optical media because the size of the details of the media is close to the wavelengths of visible light itself. Once you get to that size, there IS no 'color', to speak of, since color is just the size of the wavelength itself. Conventional CD players use red or infrared lasers, I believe, which have a wide wavelength. DVD players on the other hand, use ultra-violet lasers, which have a much smaller wavelength and can be used to read finer details.

  • What about... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Tuxinatorium ( 463682 ) on Sunday February 02, 2003 @08:58PM (#5212630) Homepage
    Carbon nanotubes? Like fullerenes, except they're long cylenders instead of spherical. And they conduct electricity quite well.
  • Incremental developments in computer technology result in better, faster, cheaper products!

    A lead researcher on the team is quoted as saying: "Yes, this means that current developmental trends will continue..." while another: "We really thought we'd reached the end, but, with this, we can continue revolutionizing the world just like we did last year!"

    In other news, the sun is due to rise again tomorrow sometime in the morning....
  • They are trying to make disks more reliable. Fluid dynamic bearings (FDB) don't wear out as easily as ball bearings. You know...that grinding sound that your disk makes as it spins up and searches for data...yeah that goes away with FDB.
    I was just checking out a drive by western digital yesterday with FDB...a 160Gig unit. I think it was about a buck a gig, and I would assume much more reliable than my current lowly 30Gig and 20Gig drives...
    ahhh...progress...

    Hell, I remember being able to work on those REAL hard disk drives. You know, the cartridge ones. Roughly 15 inches in diameter...placed on a unit that stands up to your waist...with a reader arm as big around as my thumb that juts in and out like a pogostick....

    Yeah, those were the days. Those drives are still usefull for the sake of basic electronics study though...makes it nice so that the students can see teh inner workings of a disk drive. I think they only stored like 8 Megabytes....maybe less. :) Sure beat tapes at least.
  • Nickel sensors? We've had technology like this for years, at least since the early 80s.

    Whenever I was at the arcade or Bugsy's Subs, and I lost my last man playing Berzerk [24.128.235.130], the machine would say "coin detected in pocket!" If we had working quarter sensors back in the 80s, then what's the big deal with nickel sensors now?

  • Girls (Score:2, Funny)

    by SB5 ( 165464 )
    Girls have been saying this for years; Size doesn't matter. Anywho, what girls really want is reliability, at least that's what I have been told.

    Then again, I'm slacking on that end, among others....
  • Now that we can have (massively?) increased storage capacity per square inch, shouldn't we start seeing hard disks in the 3.5" form factor that are really 4+ way RAID volumes with a builtin hardware driver to make it behave as a normal disk would? That way you'd get basically what you have now but MUCH more reliably and maybe even a little more capacity. (depending on the massiveness of the change this development can cause in size/data ratio)

    Running a PC or a 1U web server on a single hard disk is making for an awfully large failure point if it dies--it's the least replaceable component cause of data loss and they die a lot. Introducing redundancy at this level could help a lot with that issue (and help high density multicomputer serving become more reliable and fault tolerant)

    Brian

  • "Ballistic Magnetoresistance?" (Score:3, Funny)

    by Maxwell'sSilverLART ( 596756 ) on Monday February 03, 2003 @01:19AM (#5213483) Homepage

    "Ballistic Magnetoresistance?" I thought that was the resistance offered by the magnetic platters when I use my .45 to read-protect my drive from the FBI/BSA/MS.

  • Giant, Colossal... Ballistic? (Score:3, Funny)

    by wirelessbuzzers ( 552513 ) on Monday February 03, 2003 @01:24AM (#5213502)
    This sounds like vaporware. It will never make it to the market: "ballistic magnetoresistance" just doesn't capture the imagination. Extraordinary magenetoresistance was a good start, but I'm looking for the next biggest thing in hard drive technology from either "bloody huge magnetoresistance" or "fucking enormous magnetoresistance" technologies.

    Geez. They might as well have named it obese magnetoresistance. Ballistic my ass.

Slashdot Top Deals

Get hold of portable property. -- Charles Dickens, "Great Expectations"

Close