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Fujitsu announces ultra-dense HDD technology
A 500GB desktop hard drive is quite handy, and is still somewhat impressive. It's soon being overtaken by even larger models, though, and nearly every HDD manufacturer has an affordable 500GB offering. What's more impressive? If they can shrink it down to 1.8” form factor. Fujitsu has announced the development of a technology that lets them get data densities as small as a Terabit per square inch. Interestingly enough, this was accomplished by mixing some components of optical technologies with existing magnetic technologies:
The process integrates optical elements as part of the manufacturing process for the hard drive. A lens is used to focus an extremely tight beam onto the magnetic platter. The beam heats the platter which allows easier recording on the magnetic media. Using a specially designed optical element, Fujitsu was able to attain a spot size of 88nm by 60nm with 17 percent optical efficiency.
Imagine having a 500GB iPod, or a laptop with 2 500GB HDDs in the space you formerly fit a single 2.5” in. Release dates for drives using such a technology haven't been made available, and nor have potential capacities. It sounds incredibly useful though.
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User Comments (3)
Post a comment| peterpainter on November 30, 2006 9:06 PM | Impressive, but I still wonder how long it will be before they go 100% SOLID STATE without any moving parts that can wear out or become damaged, I should know, I owe a maxtor 80GB hardrive with a damaged head or needles if that is what you call it and a failing 300gb Seagate hard drive with the same problem. Why hard drives can not be like USB MEMORY STICKS? NO MOVING PARTS.I wish someone would finally listen.
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| mkatz2m on December 1, 2006 7:27 AM | I never trust the current technology much either. However, I have gotten around the problem simply by always putting in a second hard drive to only be used for Ghost images of the C drive which I never partition. The Ghost software is very easy to use and the second hard drive never fails since I do not use this drive for anything other than Ghost backups. The most current Ghost image on the second drive has saved me multiple times on 2 different machines where one C drive failed(I simply bought another hard drive and replaced it before restoring the image) or the operating system has gotten corrupted.
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| peas on December 3, 2006 1:39 PM | Originally posted by peterpainter:
How long.. When solid state storage becomes as reliable and cheap as magnetic platters. What you fail to consider is that current flash memory has limited write cycles (100k to around 1M), whereas magnetic platters support such high # of write cycles as to be essentially unlimited. Using current flash memory as a hard drive will fail relatively quickly due to the limited write cycles. I'd estimate a few months, though even if it were as long as a year, that's not enough. Flash memory is also incredibly expensive compared to magnetic platters. There are some promising technologies in the pipe, but they aren't in mass production yet and may not be for some years. Hard drives are here to stay. [Edited by peas on 2006-12-03 13:44:10]
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