News Perpendicular recording + Anodising = 1Tb per sq. Inch

[GreatOldOne]

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2005/06..._Breakthrough/

[Firehed]

that's ter(r?)abit, correct?
and what's the S.A. of a platter?

still, interesting, although the timeframe given would seemingly put it right on schedule.

still... we need FASTER hard drives, not bigger, imo. I'm waiting for that gigabyte ram-based thing to become available... I wouldn't mind 4+ gigs of storage limited by the interface (I DO hope they make that a sataII interface)

[mclean007]

Originally Posted by Firehed

that's ter(r?)abit, correct?
and what's the S.A. of a platter?

still, interesting, although the timeframe given would seemingly put it right on schedule.

still... we need FASTER hard drives, not bigger, imo. I'm waiting for that gigabyte ram-based thing to become available... I wouldn't mind 4+ gigs of storage limited by the interface (I DO hope they make that a sataII interface)

let's not forget RAID-0 - with two of those bad boys striped on a SATAII interface, you'd be flying. If you have the £$€ you could pack each one with 4 x 4gig DIMMS for a total of 32 gigs of lightning fast storage. Would set you back a fair bit mind. 4gig DIMMS are going for about £1,600 a pop at the moment, so you're looking at £12,800 ex VAT plus the cost of the cards -

[Lowsidex2]

Originally Posted by Firehed

we need FASTER hard drives, not bigger, imo.

No doubt. I sick of these slow sustained transfer speeds, especially when I deal with dvd shrink and such. 3gb/s for SATAII.... yeah, maybe for the nanosecond it takes to fill a 8MB buffer. At best I can get a sustained transfer(disk to disk) speed of about 60MB a second(if absolutely nothing else is going on). It's usually much less.

[Tanaban]

Originally Posted by mclean007

let's not forget RAID-0 - with two of those bad boys striped on a SATAII interface, you'd be flying. If you have the £$€ you could pack each one with 4 x 4gig DIMMS for a total of 32 gigs of lightning fast storage. Would set you back a fair bit mind. 4gig DIMMS are going for about £1,600 a pop at the moment, so you're looking at £12,800 ex VAT plus the cost of the cards -

Actually no. From what I have read the card is fairly cheap, but the card can only handle 4 GB of ram total. That and the first retail avaliable version will be SATA1.

[mclean007]

Originally Posted by Tanaban

Actually no. From what I have read the card is fairly cheap, but the card can only handle 4 GB of ram total. That and the first retail avaliable version will be SATA1.

Yeah, sorry I should have made that clear. I was hypothesising about the possibilities of a future version without the 32bit memory limit and with a SATAII interface.

[Firehed]

Pooh. But as you could get quite a few cards (they get power to charge the battery and power the ram from the PCI slot, I'm very perplexed as to why they don't just make it a PCIE card that transfers right over an x1 lane, that's 250MB/s each direction, better than the 150MB/s of SATA1 and no cables and it would actually get people caring about more than the x16 slots.

But seeing as you can pick up a 1GB stick for about $80 (and remember, the cheapest stuff will be fifty times faster than can be used), a 4 gig drive for the OS running at 150MB/s is just drool good. And $320 or so plus the card (I'm expecting it to start retailing at probably $150, but I could easily see that or a similar product dropping below the $40 mark at some point). Sure you could buy a 400-gig drive for less than that, but no seek time (well, a couple ns) and superb sustained transfer rates... never wait for that 400-item start menu to load again.

And you can certainly expect future cards like that to have eight to sixteen slots with the newest interface. I can really see the SATA-III interface slated for 2008 (600MB/s, plus the various sata-ii goodies) paying off, especially if you factor in raid. Assuming the tech is good enough so you don't worry about the volitility of ram (or mram becomes available, thus the constant power wouldn't be necessary), you'd have almost zero chance of "drive" failure making a 4-"disk" RAID0 array simply expensive but not overly risky.

a 2 gig dimm is "only" $370 or so too (pc2700 ecc reg cas2.5). still, ram will keep getting bigger and products like that will of course accept larger capacity dimms at some point.

and I don't think it's the 32-bit memory limit that would affect the ram-disk device, as it's more or less independant of the processor, I think it's just the controller on the device. At least ponder 64bit could access 16 exabytes (I think... 2^64 bits, right?) of ram.

[3.5SE]

I could be wrong but if the power goes out for more than 12 hours don't those gigabyte cards loose their data?

[Latvietis]

Yeah that's nice ,but we still need faster and much more durable HDD's . What's the point of high-end CPU's, RAM and GPU's if it all is slowed down by one single HDD. RAID would speed up everything but that's just for those who really know how pc works and how to use it. Oh yes, if you have one of these HDD's filled full with illegal music and/or movies then the RIAA can put you behind the bars for a very, very long time.

[Firehed]

yes, that's the problem with ram-based drives as they are now. with magnetic ram, it wouldn't be a problem, but ideally we'd have something with the (non-)volatility of flash media combined with the speed and durability of system ram being used for something like this. Well I dunno if it's 12 hours, but I'm sure it's a fairly short amount of time. I think DDR2-based solutions, although more expensive, could expand that time as it should draw less power. And that time will be lower with more sticks and more capacity, too.

and latvietis I'm almost positive no pirate has been arrested, just sued. the guys who have hard drives dedicated to seeding stuff they won't use perhaps, and the torrent site owners potentially, but not likely the average user.

[Latvietis]

Originally Posted by Firehed

and latvietis I'm almost positive no pirate has been arrested, just sued. the guys who have hard drives dedicated to seeding stuff they won't use perhaps, and the torrent site owners potentially, but not likely the average user.

Well you don't know the average user here in Latvia and other part's of Europe.

[FIBRE+]

I too arent too bothered about insane ammounts of storage, for the average comsumer 80gb is more than enough, 10 terrabytes or more is a bit much, but obviously the more they advance the technology the better. I would however preffer some ultra fast user friendly stable solid state storage, hard drives in there current form look like there running out of steam speed wise.

What happened to that alloy cube thingy that that professor at a uk University was developing? (few years back now) it was supposed to a 3d solid state device that was ultra fast and held terrabytes in an inch square cube (correct me if im worng).

I was looking at the Gigabyte ram drive card thingy and also then thought about the obvious issue... what about if you loose all power for a long period of time. Ram will only hold data for about 30 secounds after its power is stoped, I presume it has an onboard rechargeable battery but if that fails your screwed, ah well, its still pretty cool tho

[Firehed]

Yes, there's a small battery on it. I still don't see it holding power for very long, though.

[Cheap Mod Wannabe]

Ha ha ha Oh man don't remind me those days I spent in LITHUANIA. =D Growing up around PC geeks I first was introduced to a 50MHz PC at 4years of age (1992) and then 55-60-80MHz and so on. I remember when one day DOS was out and win were around. Windows and paint accompanied with FDD games were my friends when growing up. I saw so many Windows and other OS installation CD's but only in 1999 was the first time when I saw a legimate copy of windows 95. That was the year when first time in Lithuanian history (there actually is one LMAO) when law and government started doing something against illegal software. Europe is bad in that way.... And game CD copies are about $5 if translated to US dollar. They are sold in stores!!! They are produced in Russia and then exported. They have very simple packading but they have some weird legimate stickers.

EDIT: SRY Off topic

[Hamish]

Originally Posted by Firehed

Yes, there's a small battery on it. I still don't see it holding power for very long, though.

what would be awesome is if you could have a 4gig partition on your traditional hard drive and have the ramdrive automatically copy it over at boot and then launch windows from the ramdrive, and periodically save back any changes
that way you wouldn't have to worry about losing data

[3.5SE]

These RAM drives are bleeding edge technology. It's not really ready for primetime but many will pull the trigger to have the latest and greatest. If you want your PC to turn on faster (not boot faster) just put it into S3 suspend mode. That's what I do with my media center PC. It fires right back up in a few seconds and is right where I left off. In S3 the fans stop all your chips cool down but a little power is still provided to the ram to hold your place. If the power goes out and you're not on a UPS you lose your place but it's a pretty cheap alternative = free.

[Highland3r]

Originally Posted by Hamish

what would be awesome is if you could have a 4gig partition on your traditional hard drive and have the ramdrive automatically copy it over at boot and then launch windows from the ramdrive, and periodically save back any changes
that way you wouldn't have to worry about losing data

Sure a little script could be written to do that on each boot and shutdown, along with updating the drive at regualr intervals.
The Gigabyte solution looks very interesting tbh, dont see 4gb being of massive use, maybe to install an OS on perhaps. Using the ramdrive as a swap partition maybe a viable solution though, add a gig of ram, should boost performance nicely compared to using a regualr hdd...

[kickarse]

The thing though they've had solid state drives for a while now...

[3.5SE]

Originally Posted by kickarse

The thing though they've had solid state drives for a while now...

Even though they've been around for a while I wouldn't consider them ready for mainstream use until your data doesn't disappear with a power outage. Just my 2 cents. Any speed gained in boot times is lost by re-installing your OS more frequently or just use a UPS.