7 ms·

New hard disk write head analytical technology can increase hard disk capacities

94 points by XzetaU8 6y ago

agumonkey 6y ago
Even if HDD disappear, the sheer depth of research that went into it will remain impressive for very long.
- jbay808 6y ago
  That's true, although the technological literacy to make them might disappear. Their disappearance could also have other knock-on effects in other industries, like shrinking the market for high-precision air bearing spindles, magnetic testers, lapping machines, and so on.
  - agumonkey 6y ago
    and atomic thin metallic coating (IIUC disk platters have one atom thick platinum layer sometimes... crazy)
- xadhominemx 6y ago
  The HDD market will it disappear for a very long time - decades away. Remarkably, with energy assist technologies, write density improvements will actually accelerate over the coming decade.
- globular-toast 6y ago
  It's the same with internal combustion engines. And on a smaller scale, when that bit of custom code you wrote is obsolete because someone else wrote a better library. I find it a bit sad and hard to let go of such things. I'm sure I'm not the only one.
  - agumonkey 6y ago
    There's a lot of science in them but it's a bit less extreme (in my newb eyes) than hard drives.. I mean the head control involves air flow. And it's so minute.
    - globular-toast 6y ago
      Modern internal combustion engines (think formula 1) are probably way more complicated than you realise. I mean, why would they not be using technology as cutting edge as hard disks? They've been around for a lot longer so have a lot more knowledge sunk into them.
      - agumonkey 6y ago
        yeah ok, there are ICE that are extreme levels of sophistication too. Even some mainstream class cars have fancy engines. But it's not as extreme as the average hdd any user had in his computer without realizing the level of physical depth involved.
Ductapemaster 6y ago
Some days I dream of a distant future in which an average being (human or otherwise) comes in contact with a hard disk drive containing humanity's knowledge. I think about the vast number of layers that have been combined to create such a marvel of technology, simply to store data in an efficient way. Sure, you might be able to figure out the physics of magnetic storage, or even the basic electronics, but what about the motor controller? The architecture and firmware on the storage controller? The electrical interfaces to the storage controller? Let's assume you even get that far. What about the physical layout of data on the drive? The filesystem? The file formats? That's not even all of it, and there is just so, so much that would be incomprehensible to a single individual, however intelligent. It's truly incredible how we've been able to combine years and years of knowledge into something most humans would just take for granted. “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” -Arthur C. Clarke
- offtop5 6y ago
  Would a hard drive even last that long. I hope that we have something, something like the seed bank which saves the most important data of the past. Would kind of suck if no one had a SATA in 500 years though
  - tyingq 6y ago
    Laser engraving tiny text on a hard surface maybe? https://nanorosetta.com/ https://nanorosetta.com/
- schoen 6y ago
  A cool project that responds to or takes account of this (trying to make a storage artifact that someone plausibly could learn to use without most of our technological knowledge) is https://rosettaproject.org/ https://rosettaproject.org/. It's a somewhat high-density archival storage medium that tries to give a clear hint of what it contains and how to read it, just requiring optical magnification. Of course, that means its overall capacity is many orders of magnitude less than the hard drive you describe.
- smarx007 6y ago
Causality1 6y ago
Excellent news. The pattern of the last five to eight years of the prices being effectively the same when I go to buy a new hard drive is incredibly depressing compared to the yearly halving of my youth.
- SECProto 6y ago
  I just bought a 14TB drive for 250 canadian - equivalent to $0.0141 USD per gb. According to a backblaze blog from 3 years ago [1], they were at $0.024 per gb four years ago. So they certainly havent halved, but the prices are definitely still dropping. [1] https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-cost-per-gigabyte/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-cost-per-gigabyte/
  - avtar 6y ago
    Which drive did you pick?
    - SECProto 6y ago
      Was a good sale on WD Easystore external drive from Bestbuy. Back up to MSRP now.
      - avtar 6y ago
        Thanks! I'll keep an eye out.
        sliken 6y ago
        Careful, or you might end up with a shingled drive with radically worse write performance than you might expect.
        SECProto 6y ago
        Note that shingled drives are totally fine for many use cases. I bought this 14TB drive to act as a secondary backup for non-critical data, I expect it'll be a write-once-read-rarely kind of situation. Even if it is SMR, it'll be fine for me. Don't use large SMR drives as OS or software drives, or drives that do a lot of changes when you're above 50% fill capacity on the drive
blackrock 6y ago
Alternatively, I wonder when we will start using MEMS for storage? Say you have a MEMs device which actually physically flips an atomic sized bit, on or off, like a light switch. A little gearing machine is what will flip the atomic switches. Or read back its binary data. Hard drives can be demagnetized, and its controller board will eventually fail. This is its Achilles Heel. Flash drives can get electrocuted and fried. Tape is still magnetic, but it separates the reader and writer device, from the actual medium. But it’s too large and cumbersome. Something like a MEMS storage device, will be fully solid state. Fully enclosed. Electrically neutral. Magnetically neutral. And can last for millions of years. It’s the ultimate time capsule.
- rcxdude 6y ago
  MEMS based storage is a thing, though the most common architecture appears to be basically a magnetic system with a very large number of read/write heads (I think: the summary papers I read were extremely vague on the actual read/write/storage mechanism). The issue mostly seems to be the storage density isn't very good: the actual size of a bit is still quite large and the read/write heads also take up a fairly significant amount of space, but throughput is potentially huge because of the many heads operated in parallel. MEMS tends not to operate at the atomic scale, features of the mechanisms are usually a fair bit larger (and mechanisms which make break/make contact are generally difficult to make reliable and long-living in MEMS: surfaces will tend to stick together when they touch and rolling/sliding interfaces will wear away quickly. Almost all industrial MEMs use involves structures which only move by flexing, not the pretty looking gear systems which tend to get media coverage).
  - blackrock 6y ago
    This sounds like an opportunity for a PhD dissertation. Discover a new ability to coat micromachines, to make it resilient to wear and tear. Or to find a micro lubricant that can be used on MEMS micromachines. Btw, nice response.
Havoc 6y ago
Won’t that kill any chance of recovery though? If you need this under normal conditions then surely if there is damage then it’s game over

94 points by XzetaU8 6y ago

agumonkey 6y ago

Even if HDD disappear, the sheer depth of research that went into it will remain impressive for very long.

jbay808 6y ago
That's true, although the technological literacy to make them might disappear. Their disappearance could also have other knock-on effects in other industries, like shrinking the market for high-precision air bearing spindles, magnetic testers, lapping machines, and so on.
- agumonkey 6y ago
  and atomic thin metallic coating (IIUC disk platters have one atom thick platinum layer sometimes... crazy)
xadhominemx 6y ago
The HDD market will it disappear for a very long time - decades away. Remarkably, with energy assist technologies, write density improvements will actually accelerate over the coming decade.
globular-toast 6y ago
It's the same with internal combustion engines. And on a smaller scale, when that bit of custom code you wrote is obsolete because someone else wrote a better library. I find it a bit sad and hard to let go of such things. I'm sure I'm not the only one.
- agumonkey 6y ago
  There's a lot of science in them but it's a bit less extreme (in my newb eyes) than hard drives.. I mean the head control involves air flow. And it's so minute.
  - globular-toast 6y ago
    Modern internal combustion engines (think formula 1) are probably way more complicated than you realise. I mean, why would they not be using technology as cutting edge as hard disks? They've been around for a lot longer so have a lot more knowledge sunk into them.
    - agumonkey 6y ago
      yeah ok, there are ICE that are extreme levels of sophistication too. Even some mainstream class cars have fancy engines. But it's not as extreme as the average hdd any user had in his computer without realizing the level of physical depth involved.

Ductapemaster 6y ago

Some days I dream of a distant future in which an average being (human or otherwise) comes in contact with a hard disk drive containing humanity's knowledge. I think about the vast number of layers that have been combined to create such a marvel of technology, simply to store data in an efficient way. Sure, you might be able to figure out the physics of magnetic storage, or even the basic electronics, but what about the motor controller? The architecture and firmware on the storage controller? The electrical interfaces to the storage controller? Let's assume you even get that far. What about the physical layout of data on the drive? The filesystem? The file formats? That's not even all of it, and there is just so, so much that would be incomprehensible to a single individual, however intelligent. It's truly incredible how we've been able to combine years and years of knowledge into something most humans would just take for granted. “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” -Arthur C. Clarke

offtop5 6y ago
Would a hard drive even last that long. I hope that we have something, something like the seed bank which saves the most important data of the past. Would kind of suck if no one had a SATA in 500 years though
- tyingq 6y ago
  Laser engraving tiny text on a hard surface maybe? https://nanorosetta.com/ https://nanorosetta.com/
schoen 6y ago
A cool project that responds to or takes account of this (trying to make a storage artifact that someone plausibly could learn to use without most of our technological knowledge) is https://rosettaproject.org/ https://rosettaproject.org/. It's a somewhat high-density archival storage medium that tries to give a clear hint of what it contains and how to read it, just requiring optical magnification. Of course, that means its overall capacity is many orders of magnitude less than the hard drive you describe.
smarx007 6y ago

Causality1 6y ago

Excellent news. The pattern of the last five to eight years of the prices being effectively the same when I go to buy a new hard drive is incredibly depressing compared to the yearly halving of my youth.

SECProto 6y ago
I just bought a 14TB drive for 250 canadian - equivalent to $0.0141 USD per gb. According to a backblaze blog from 3 years ago [1], they were at $0.024 per gb four years ago. So they certainly havent halved, but the prices are definitely still dropping. [1] https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-cost-per-gigabyte/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-cost-per-gigabyte/
- avtar 6y ago
  Which drive did you pick?
  - SECProto 6y ago
    Was a good sale on WD Easystore external drive from Bestbuy. Back up to MSRP now.
    - avtar 6y ago
      Thanks! I'll keep an eye out.
      - sliken 6y ago
        Careful, or you might end up with a shingled drive with radically worse write performance than you might expect.
        SECProto 6y ago
        Note that shingled drives are totally fine for many use cases. I bought this 14TB drive to act as a secondary backup for non-critical data, I expect it'll be a write-once-read-rarely kind of situation. Even if it is SMR, it'll be fine for me. Don't use large SMR drives as OS or software drives, or drives that do a lot of changes when you're above 50% fill capacity on the drive

blackrock 6y ago

Alternatively, I wonder when we will start using MEMS for storage? Say you have a MEMs device which actually physically flips an atomic sized bit, on or off, like a light switch. A little gearing machine is what will flip the atomic switches. Or read back its binary data. Hard drives can be demagnetized, and its controller board will eventually fail. This is its Achilles Heel. Flash drives can get electrocuted and fried. Tape is still magnetic, but it separates the reader and writer device, from the actual medium. But it’s too large and cumbersome. Something like a MEMS storage device, will be fully solid state. Fully enclosed. Electrically neutral. Magnetically neutral. And can last for millions of years. It’s the ultimate time capsule.

rcxdude 6y ago
MEMS based storage is a thing, though the most common architecture appears to be basically a magnetic system with a very large number of read/write heads (I think: the summary papers I read were extremely vague on the actual read/write/storage mechanism). The issue mostly seems to be the storage density isn't very good: the actual size of a bit is still quite large and the read/write heads also take up a fairly significant amount of space, but throughput is potentially huge because of the many heads operated in parallel. MEMS tends not to operate at the atomic scale, features of the mechanisms are usually a fair bit larger (and mechanisms which make break/make contact are generally difficult to make reliable and long-living in MEMS: surfaces will tend to stick together when they touch and rolling/sliding interfaces will wear away quickly. Almost all industrial MEMs use involves structures which only move by flexing, not the pretty looking gear systems which tend to get media coverage).
- blackrock 6y ago
  This sounds like an opportunity for a PhD dissertation. Discover a new ability to coat micromachines, to make it resilient to wear and tear. Or to find a micro lubricant that can be used on MEMS micromachines. Btw, nice response.

Havoc 6y ago

Won’t that kill any chance of recovery though? If you need this under normal conditions then surely if there is damage then it’s game over