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Magnetic recording breakthrough reported

sciencedaily.com

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Re: Magnetic recording breakthrough reported

#21

Post by ars »

replax wrote: post #11
jergason wrote: post #3

Can someone smarter at physics than I am explain how this works? The article specifically suggests use in hard drives, but how soon could this realistically be used in commercial hard drives?

In response to your question on availability in commercial HDs, I think that unless a comparable significant advance is made in read speeds, I doubt that you will find it in consumer grade HDDs soon. A disk that can read at e.g. 100mb/s and write at 50gb/s would be not easy to sell to the consumer at a premium price (where do I get data faster than my HD/SSD read speeds from to store?). I assume though, that it might…

I could definitely use great write speed and average read speed.

Use RAID-1 (mirroring) and have lots of disks in parallel. You can combine them for great read speed, but you still have to write to every one of them so writing is not improved.

If your write speed was much faster than read then this would work perfectly.

It would also find applications in things like data archiving, warehousing. Or buffering huge amounts of data for later processing (like the large hadron collider).

Re: Magnetic recording breakthrough reported

#22

Post by ColdAsIce »

arjn wrote: post #4
jergason wrote: post #3

Can someone smarter at physics than I am explain how this works? The article specifically suggests use in hard drives, but how soon could this realistically be used in commercial hard drives?

I'm not a physicist, this is what i understand : They've found that very quick heating of a magnetic dipole can cause it to flip. Currently this is flipping is done by a magnetic head (in hard disk drives). Since bursts of infra red light can be used for heat pulses, recording can be sped up considerably.

How could that ever work, for infrared to affect magnetism?

Re: Magnetic recording breakthrough reported

#23

Post by darklajid »

ColdAsIce wrote: post #22
arjn wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a physicist, this is what i understand : They've found that very quick heating of a magnetic dipole can cause it to flip. Currently this is flipping is done by a magnetic head (in hard disk drives). Since bursts of infra red light can be used for heat pulses, recording can be sped up considerably.

How could that ever work, for infrared to affect magnetism?

You ignored the article and what the GP said: Through heat. Not (directly) by the light.

Re: Magnetic recording breakthrough reported

#24

Post by vidarh »

replax wrote: post #9
rsanchez1 wrote: post #5

How would the performance compare to a SSD?

Well the article mentions that: "This revolutionary method allows the recording of Terabytes (thousands of Gigabytes) of information per second" Therefore, If you can write 1TB/sec the seek it would pretty much outperform any SSD cluster, in terms of writespeed. unfortunately, nothing is said about read speeds/access times and I assume that that will be a harder problem. Because they are still storing the data magnet…

SSD read/write speed is pretty much limited by cost and bus speeds, not technology, as for the foreseeable future you can boost it by putting more chips in parallel (which is why current high end SSD solutions are pretty much all on PCIe cards, because they're already way too fast for SAS or SATA etc.). The same would probably become the limiting factor for this technology too, even if they can solve the read speed issue.

Re: Magnetic recording breakthrough reported

#25

Post by replax »

redthrowaway wrote: post #18
replax wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well the article mentions that: "This revolutionary method allows the recording of Terabytes (thousands of Gigabytes) of information per second" Therefore, If you can write 1TB/sec the seek it would pretty much outperform any SSD cluster, in terms of writespeed. unfortunately, nothing is said about read speeds/access times and I assume that that will be a harder problem. Because they are still storing the data magnet…

On top of the read problem, they have to deal with the fact that HDDs are just really energy-inefficient. With the world going to mobile, we can't predicate the future on the need for moving parts. It's a damned cool technology, and I hope it leads to something useful, but I just can't see it becoming the prevalent paradigm.

Yes, you're right the world is going mobile and in mobile less (no) moving parts is better (more durable etc.) That is also why I think that consumer grade devices will be unlikely (unless read speeds are bumped up, too)

But mobile, in our case, means also a shift to the cloud, where significant more potent storage technologies could make a real difference. I really hope, too, that technology will lead to something new.

Re: Magnetic recording breakthrough reported

#26

Post by yread »

ars wrote: post #19
InclinedPlane wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sort of a moot point regardless. If you have a spinning disk the average latency and maximum read or write speed is determined by the speed of the disk.

Not necessarily. For example you could have many read heads and read from the disk much faster by reading in parallel. It's complicated to do, but it is possible. You can also increase the areal density, which means more bits fly past the head per second, which also increases speed, even though you can't increase the rotational or seek speed.

I would expect that's how they plan on getting to those ridiculous write speeds. Decrease the size of 1 bit so that more of them would fit on one track (a circle on a platter). They would be able to do that since the time to flip the region of the bit would be smaller. However, there is still the problem of finding a material with that much smaller magnetic regions. Which is already a problem in current drives (perpendicular recording) so I don't expect this to fly.

Re: Magnetic recording breakthrough reported

#27

Post by lmm »

johapers wrote: post #20
afhof wrote: post #6

Does this affect read speed at all? The article only mentions write speed.

The readout will still be carried out by a magnetoresistive sensor, so that is not directly affected. With a smaller bit size it might be necessary to further develop the read head, but the road map for that is quite well understood at the moment.

Didn't minidiscs read the data optically? Could that tech be combined with this to make a pure-laser hard disk?

Re: Magnetic recording breakthrough reported

#28

Post by jcfrei »

I tend to believe that in the short/mid future consumer hardware will mostly consist of SSD or similiar solid state forms of memory. Abandoning spinning disks and relying on much faster, smaller and more reliable memory seems so much more promising than hard disks.

Re: Magnetic recording breakthrough reported

#29

Post by eru »

jcfrei wrote: post #28

I tend to believe that in the short/mid future consumer hardware will mostly consist of SSD or similiar solid state forms of memory. Abandoning spinning disks and relying on much faster, smaller and more reliable memory seems so much more promising than hard disks.

Yes. But remember, tape was displaced from the mainstream, but lives on in professional backups. There will still be lots of profitable applications for spinning disk.
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