News Hard drive speed limit is reached

Och, Cap'n - they cannae take no more! This from the Beeb:

US scientists have found the theoretical maximum speed that data can be written to a PC's hard drive.
They discovered the limit by shooting electrons travelling close to the speed of light at a chunk of the same material used in computer hard drives

This created magnetic field pulses too short to alter the material's properties and record a bit of data.

The discovery might force hard drive makers to use exotic materials or new methods to breach this speed limit.

Full story here. There's more on the story at Wired

Athough according to the article, we won't need to switch to exotic materials like kryptonite just yet, as the fastest speed is still 1000 times faster than the quickest drives around today.

 

What will superman do if all the pc's in the world have kryptonite in them

 

Buy a mac? LOL

 

Last time I looked, Mac's had HDD as well...

 

Another reason why we should put more cash into developing large capacity solid state.

 

Hmmm. Solid state storage... silent storage is all good.

 

Agree.

I knew this was gonna come.

 

Damn it and there's me thinking I had the answer

 

solid state should be developed now so the prices are very cheap as soon as possible. Making bigger slow hard drives is like replication. The error multiplys itself

solid state is where it shoud be at

 

.

 

this reminds me of a research project I did last term- it was on the "future of computing". We got bored of serious stuff and so we put in a section on actual theoretical (i.e laws of physics) limits of hardware. I think the funniest one was a hard drive- in theory the data storage can get so dense that eventually the device will collapse into a write-only state (commonly known as a black hole )

Sadly, we'll never get even close to that...

Sam

 

dude 100 years ago people thought if you when 21 miles an hours you'd die.

 

12mph actually...

*n

 

running very fast infact..

 

trust me penski people were scared of 21 not 12 mph.

 

Very nice, but I'd like to see them implement it into a physical hard drive in a 3.5" by 4" by 1" package

What sort of solid state are we talking about here?

DRAM based? Well that is extremely expensive and if you have a powercut you're so screwed. Quick though. Available in very large sizes with huge price tags attached (multiple millions).

Flash based? Off the pace of DRAM disks (well depending on the Flash drive), but can be a fair bit quicker than winchester drives (see Bit-Micro). Limited number of writes though so you might end up with a disk you can't write to 155Gb drive available, but try not to think about the cost; although cheaper than DRAM based SSDs Flash based SSDs are still expensive.

Or some future uber technology like MRAM whichisn't available yet ?

 

Yea, i know it costs a lot and they've almost developed MRAM. All you need is a battery with DRAM based stuff and you're fine I know it costs a lot but i dont care for 400gigs of space, 10-15 would be nice for a boot drive, and if they start mass producing something costs go down

 

hi everyone, i remember when they said the phone lines couldnt handle 9600baud^^....

 

What about if the battery goes flat? DRAM based disks seem entirely silly to me; storing long term data on a volatile medium seems like a fools errand

 

JADS - Why not have a DRAM based drive that is backed up to a regular HD when you shut down? If your batteries go you just load it all back off the HD.

Max