TDK Discovers a Way to use Lasers to Double Hard Disc Capacity
TDK Discovers a Way to use Lasers to Double Hard Disc Capacity
Posted 10/09/2011 at 10:01am
| by Justin Kerr
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Mechanical drives might be a bit on the slow side, but the price per GB still makes them king among digital packrats. The technology behind today’s 2 & 3TB drives is currently known as perpendicular magnetic recording, but recently we seem to have hit a wall. Manufacturers are already hard at work on 4 platter-4TB drives, but were starting to reach the limitations of what’s possible. Luckily a recent collaboration by the remaining mechanical drive makers has begun to pay off, and the Storage Technology Alliance believes it has discovered a way to use lasers to blast to 8TB and beyond.
The theory itself was devised by TDK and more specifically, involves the use of lasers couple with a high coercivity material to allow for the capacity bump. The new laser approach seems to be the secret sauce behind the discovery, but will also need to be married with bit-patterned media (BPM), to assist with recording and retaining data.
The technology isn’t quite ready for prime-time just yet, so TDK has been pretty tight lipped about the exact details. Either way it should give the fans on team mechanical new hope. SSD cost per GB has been dropping pretty rapidly over the past few years, but I shudder to think about how much 8TB would cost.
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keyzs
October 10, 2011 at 2:40am
guess for now the optimum solution is RAID 0 @ 4x 500GB drives with a reliable 2TB or 3TB backup.
this should be the price / performance sweet spot.
Belboz99
October 09, 2011 at 6:58pm
It's just like a modern-spin on Floptical Storage!
Floptical storage was a laser-assisted floppy storage system, the lasers helped more precicely read and write from the floptical disks, thus enabling higher capacities.
Hmm, Moptical? Hoptical?
zaeentech
October 09, 2011 at 6:46pm
This is a good news for those of us who need ever increasing storage for our HD & other multimedia contents.
Coldrage
October 09, 2011 at 10:56am
Since DRAM is so cheap now, why not stuff a bunch of chips into a 3'5 chassis with a rechargable battery and call it a day? Would be way faster than SSDs and cheap too.
d3v
October 10, 2011 at 3:26am
Your operating system already caches disk reads and writes using main memory (RAM). So sticking DRAM into a hard drive doesn't help at all. In fact it makes it impossible to take advantage of better memory managment algos that come with newer operating systems.
aarcane
October 09, 2011 at 2:33pm
That's actually an existing technology used by video editors and in high end data centers. it's cheaper to throw 64GB into a drive bay and use it as r/w cache than it is SSDs, and it's more durable and lower latency.
I've been contemplating deploying it in conjunction with ZFS.
kixofmyg0t
October 09, 2011 at 12:32pm
Hmm. Well 8GB of Ram is about $48.....
So that would make a 64GB drive over $300.....
So using ur logic, 4TB's will set you back about $24,288.......yup thats a GREAT idea.....
scottd34
October 10, 2011 at 4:13am
Yep they exist and theyre called Ramsans. Nice drives. Have a built in hard drive and ups as part of the unit for power failures. http://www.ramsan.com/products/rackmount-ram-storage/ramsan-400
Coldrage
October 09, 2011 at 1:41pm
stuffing them onto a larger controller than the usual RAM module itself would be much cheaper and the technology is different because you're not plugging it into a DIMM, hurr durr
Morpheous416
October 09, 2011 at 3:28pm
I don't like to be the bearer of bad news here, Coldrage.. .but uh, DRAM chips rely on a steady source of power in order to maintain the data they store. DRAM 101 if you will.
So not only would it be impracticable to use DRAM for mass storage, it would be unlikely that anyone is going to start developing power supplies that leave power on to the hard drives while the rest of the system has been shut down.
And.. when you go to take your system apart to clean it, and unplug said supply to the drive... everything on that drive would be lost. You mentioned using a battery, well batteries die out, power supplies fail, and you can guarantee that you would never be quick enough to swap out either one without risking the loss of all data on the drive. Reinstalling the OS can be a time consuming job for those that don't know the short cuts to doing so, and that's every other year or so... who's gonna want to do that every time the power fails?
There's a reason techno-engineers don't always go with what seems to be the obvious answer... because it's more obvious that it would be a bigger failure!
livebriand
October 09, 2011 at 7:11pm
Remember, when the PC shuts down, it cuts off power to the hard drive, whether you unplug it or not. And batteries in the DRAM SSD dying? Terrible idea.
AkuPenguin
October 09, 2011 at 10:16am
What ever happened to those holographic drives they'd created a few years ago that could store inforation in three dimensions?
warptek2010
October 09, 2011 at 10:39am
Seems the company pushing the technology shut down in 2010 either due to lack of interest or funding or both. Weird and a shame.
See the following link.
http://www.televisionbroadcast.com/article/94340
kixofmyg0t
October 09, 2011 at 10:49am
You will see them again TRUST ME.
Why bother spending MILLIONS of dollars developing and bringing a tech to market when you can invent it, get proof of concept, and then just wait for someone else to make it so you can sue them?
You cant seriously say that they shut down due to lack of interest. They wernt a mega corperation, therfor couldnt afford to "invent".
kixofmyg0t
October 09, 2011 at 10:43am
Apple watched an episode of Star Trek and decided to patent the word "Holographic"(used by permission by Apple btw, had to pay them $1.39) that way noone else could ever DREAM of using that "magical"(damn it ANOTHER word they own) tech.
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