Areal Density Limits in HD platters

[liquidtech]

It seems as if hard drives may be reaching their capacity peak in the coming years. One of the major drawbacks in capacity seems to be the areal density of the platters. Just like cd burners have reached their end at 52x how far will hard disk drives go? SCI AM density article

 

[liquidtech]

Areal Density Article

 

[Mday]

cd burners and readers reach around 52x because any faster, and material considerations will make the discs fail, and break. most of this has to do with the heat generated, which starts to weaken the the plastic. Combined with the forces on the spinning disc, this will mean plastic or elastic deformation which is quite bad. and any scratches on the disc will make those areas weaker, so further weakening will cause failure.

 

[zephyrprime]

Nah, I don't think we'll be hitting limits anytime soon. There are always new things like ballistics mageto resistance and pixie dust that give better areal densities.

 

[giocopiano]

I would like to know the impact of higher density on reliability. I would suspect it lessens it as it sounds to me like hard drives are coming under more and more criticism for it these days.

 

[MrDudeMan]

i think this all doesnt matter as soon as solid state becomes mainstream

 

[everman]

Originally posted by: zephyrprime
Nah, I don't think we'll be hitting limits anytime soon. There are always new things like ballistics mageto resistance and pixie dust that give better areal densities.

Pixie dust, cheap, soybased, and if used enough your servers will fix themselves.

er well ya, I think we'll see 1Tb drives pretty soon. I think the largest currently are 250g. At the current rate, 1 Tb shouldn't be more than 3-4 yrs off. as long as they still try to keep up with moores law anyway..should be sooner than 3 I think.

 

[zephyrprime]

Pixie dust, cheap, soybased, and if used enough your servers will fix themselves.

Yeah, it a commercial, but it's real too. pixie dust

 

[rimshaker]

EMR (Extraordinary Magnetoresistance) technology is coming soon, replacing today's GMR (Giant Magnetoresistance) technology.

In a nutshell at its most fundamental level, GMR recognizes electron spin orientations to differentiate states. Whereas EMR recognizes electrons orbital shapes (remember s, p, d, f, g orbitals?).

EMR pretty much brings areal density up to the terabyte levels along with noticeable performance increases.

 

[Shalmanese]

Its all very good saying all this new tech is around the corner but you still can't ignore the fact that HD manufacturers are running on razor thin margins and the majority of people are suffering from a glut of HD space. While hardcore leechers and amatuer movie makers cant get enough HD space, the average computer user is using 40GB to store a couple of word docs and his digital camera photos as well as some email.

Maybe the XP Media Center can change all that but the demand for more storage isn't as strong as the demand for cheaper storage.

 

[zephyrprime]

Yeah, I agree with you Shalmanese. We might soon be more limited by a lack of demand rather than a lack of technology.