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Beyond about ~100 MB historically speaking the industry shifted towards magneto-optical systems. They do store data magnetically - but they're read with lasers
by retrac 2y ago
Beyond about ~100 MB historically speaking the industry shifted towards magneto-optical systems. They do store data magnetically - but they're read with lasers, since tracking and physical wear and tear from a head in contact with the medium, were the major limitations when it came to increasing floppy disk density. There's a neat effect where certain kinds of crystals vary their reflectivity depending on magnetization, which is how they work.
Sony's MiniDisc was an example but in the '80s and '90s there were many competing variations.
- hinkley 2y agoI looked it up later yesterday, and it looks like after the Jaz drive we tried out a design where the read heads were built into the cartridge. Presumably to avoid the problem with the relative size of dust versus the flying height and of a byte on disk. But we also started seeing triple platter or sometimes more in hard drives, making the gap even bigger. 1.8” hard drives in a hot swap slot would work pretty well for something like the device in this article.
- Dylan16807 2y agoIf you want a nice chunky insert that may or may not have a small hard drive inside, it sounds like you're describing CompactFlash.
- hinkley 2y agoI would take a future bet that the moment we have something that can replace flash memory we will drop it like a hot rock and then tease each other about how dumb we were to entrust real data to being stored on it.
- Dylan16807 2y agoIt's not like we have a choice. We don't have any robust storage technologies for normal use, so it's flash and hard drives being unreliable versus not storing data at all. Tape is the best shot for large medium-term archives, but I bet if you baby flash with a small number of writes and cool storage temperatures it'll also last 20-30 years.