Recording analog to a hard disk

[Rubycon]

If one were to convert a hard disk so the heads record to the platters in analog fashion (like a tape deck) how much "capacity" would one yield?

 

[Rubycon]

?

Anyone?

 

[Mark R]

Dunno, but I'm not sure it would be that much more.

My impression was that the SNR when reading modern HD platters was so poor, the decoding process requires sophisticated FEC and expectation-maximization maximum-likelihood reconstruction algorithms. This suggests that you barely get 1 bit of data stored per raw bit on the platter (potentially, even less than 1 bit/bit).

I used to have a still camera that recorded photos onto analog floppy discs. Digital technology seems to have superceded that - and I can see why, the analog system was pretty poor.

 

[Rubycon]

Interesting point - SNR would probably be in the realm of standard ferric tape - 60 dB. :Q

I have an old Syquest SyJet SCSI drive (1.5GB across two platters) and it's hard disk technology. I was going to try doing something like this just to see how it works. 🙂

 

[ScrapSilicon]

Originally posted by: MS Dawn
Interesting point - SNR would probably be in the realm of standard ferric tape - 60 dB. :Q

I have an old Syquest SyJet SCSI drive (1.5GB across two platters) and it's hard disk technology. I was going to try doing something like this just to see how it works. 🙂

video your endeavors 😉