WOW, 4 Terabyte Hard Drive By 2011

BobDiaz

BobDiaz

The Professor
Source:

http://www.broadcastnewsroom.com/articles/viewarticle.jsp?id=194709


Hitachi says technological feat will lead to ever-beefier hard drives: 4 terabytes by 2011


By The Associated Press

Multimedia stockpilers need not worry about laptops, digital video recorders or portable music players hitting a storage capacity ceiling any time soon.
Hitachi Ltd. says its researchers have successfully shrunken a key component in hard drives to a nanoscale that will pave the way for quadrupling today's storage limits to 4 terabytes for desktop computers and 1 terabyte on laptops in 2011.
A terabyte can hold the text of roughly 1 million books, 250 hours of high-definition video, or a quarter million songs.



"It means the industry is making good progress to advance the capacity of disk drives and move to smaller form factors," said John Rydning, an analyst at market research firm IDC.
The feat, which Hitachi plans to present Monday at the Perpendicular Magnetic Recording Conference in Tokyo, revisits a technology known as giant magnetoresistance, or GMR, that was the basis of the work of two European scientists who won the Nobel Prize in physics last week.
A hard drive has a metal disk inside that spins as an arm with an electromagnetic head at its tip hovers over it. The head reads bits of data by registering the magnetic bearing of the particles on the disk.
Capacities of hard drives have grown as researchers have crammed more bits of data closer together while also making the heads sensitive enough to read the data. The industry looks to new technologies every time physical limitations kick in, and GMR _ which allows for extremely thin layers of alternating metals to detect weak changes in magnetism _ was one of the breakthroughs that led to the fastest growth rate in the early 2000s, allowing hard drives to double in capacity every year.
But GMR-based heads maxed out, and the industry replaced the technology in recent years with an entirely different kind of head. Yet researchers are predicting that technology will soon run into capacity problems, and now GMR is making a comeback as the next-generation successor.
"We changed the direction of the current and adjusted the materials to get good properties," said John Best, chief technologist for Hitachi's data-storage unit.
By doing so, Hitachi said it has created the world's smallest disk drive heads in the 30-nanometer to 50-nanometer range, or about 2,000 times smaller than the width of an average human hair.
Other hard drive companies are working on similar technology as well, Rydning said. He predicted the entire disk drive industry will begin migrating to this new type of GMR-based technology in 2009.
Click to expand...




If you think about it, 4TB (4,000GB) / 1GB per minute / 60 minutes per hour = 66.7 hours at the maximum data rate of the HVX-200. Not as big as the time given in the article, but still a lot of footage.



While hard drives may not be an ideal long term storage solution, that are a possible short term solution. This assumes that you have more than one copy of your files on different hard drives that are stored in different locations.



I'm impressed at how large hard drives have become. Back in the "early days" of Epson America, we were excited to have 5MB hard drives!



Bob Diaz
 
I'd almost be inclined to guess it will happen sooner than that.

You can allready get a Terra of the self at most electronics stores for a few hundred bucks. And 2TB from slightly mroe specialist dealers.

As Stanadard? yeah, could take that long. But as an option, I'd guess these figures closer to 2009

- Mikko
 
I can hardly wait to get my hands on one of these . . . gonna stick it in my P2Store!

(a little humor here guys).
 
mikkowilson said:
I'd almost be inclined to guess it will happen sooner than that.

You can allready get a Terra of the self at most electronics stores for a few hundred bucks. And 2TB from slightly mroe specialist dealers.

As Stanadard? yeah, could take that long. But as an option, I'd guess these figures closer to 2009

- Mikko
Click to expand...
I just picked up a 1 TB at Costco for $319. Compare that to the 20 MB hard drive I bought for my first Mac in 1987 for $600!!!!!!!
 
Yeah, you can get the Lacie "Porsche" 500GB external USB drives for €109/$120 right now, off the shelf on the street.
I have 2 sat on my desk, not even because I fully needed that much space, but because it was convenient, it's that cheap.

- Mikko
 
Should happen MUCH sooner than that. We should hope to have 4tb solid state drives by then.
 
Solid state drives need to get here quicker..... Enough of this "mechanichal" HDD stuff. just string together 100 16gig SD cards.....
 
ha, I'll get an assitant to carry them for me in a backpack. Does seem odd there still planning for spinning hard drives that far into the future, talk about flogging a dead horse.
 
what? a 100 16gig sd card would fit in an Ipod once you get rid of the plastic case... just stack em up!
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top