Laser Hard Drive boasts 1Tbits/s access time, doesn't exist yet
By Joseph L. Flatley 
posted January 15th 2009 1:03PM
posted January 15th 2009 1:03PM
Whenever we uncover promising new research into lasers, we can generally be sure that it will sound really awesome, and that it will be a long time before it trickles down to the consumer electronics scene (if ever). That said, research into light powered computing has shown considerable promise -- with some folks estimating that commercial laser-drive hybrids (with picosecond pulse lasers doing the work that magnetic read/write heads once did -- something considered impossible until very recently) will be available in five years time. Although the first drives will only achieve a humble 1 TBits/s, in the future we might see femtosecond-based laser drives reaching speeds beyond 100TBits/s. And you know what they say... that's a lot of terabits.
The best part about this? Hard drive will have to be enormous.
The worst part about this? You will have to hear "pew pew pew" over and over again
No hard drives won't be enormous. There is parallel research being done to miniaturize sharks.
Best part? More pr0n!!!!!1!!!1
All I ask for is frickin' sharks that can do read/ write cycles on my mp3 collection at insane speeds.
Enormous? Nah they will be constructed in another reality and you will just infer what is stored on them by the probability wobbles in a specially designed pez dispenser. That's how they achieve the transfer rate, u click the dispenser and out pops a pez encoded at a quantum level to represent the information you requested. Reports suggest a single pez will store a weeks porn hence the 100tbit.
Now the computing device the pez dispenser plugs into, that's a whole other story.
Like a cdrw then?
no brett, it not like a walkman.
Access time? You sure you don't mean either read or write speed?
Still sounds cool. And probably won't be in production for a long time.
I thought the same thing - "access time" isn't measured in bits/s... it's measure in time-units only!
This must be a read/write speed... though it would be nice to know which, exactly! (TFA doesn't say explicitly, but it implies a read-speed).
It implies write speed, not read speed. The laser is used to write. The reading is not explained but as they say hybrid one can assume conventional magnetical read.
I love me some terabits.
i love me some tera patrick
How the hell do you morph terabits into Tera Patrick? Let me guess... she is some sort of porn star?
I love me some weetabix.
@sy
Let me guess, you used some sort of search engine? to do the guess for you.
@ Sy
Like you didn't know she was a Porn Star who used to be a high school teacher ...... and has a great Rack.
Windows will still run slow...
Time to ditch that 486DX man, I love some things nostalgic, but not my computers.
lol well played
Sounds like your trying to dazzle your readers with a lot of jargo.
The title doesn't make sense.
Nonetheless, the technology is interesting.
But beyond use in enterprise server rooms, I don't see a need for this at the consumer level.
Are consumers really this impatient?
MUST HAVE NOW
(does that answer your question?)
It's future development. It really wasn't that long ago that hard drives maxed out at 2 gigs, then 200 megs. Before that 20 megs, etc. As size has increased, so has speed to compensate. Maybe you don't need this now, but it opens the door for things we haven't even imagined yet. If the processor increases while hard drive speed stays the same, your hard drive becomes a bottleneck. Same goes for graphics processing, memory speeds, etc. This is a natural progression, but a pretty big step.
So does it eliminate the spinning drive. I'm not exactly sure what this does, but if there is still a spinning drive it will still have a slow access time.
If it eliminates the spinning disc, or something spinning, would it not be considered similar to an ssd?
I'm curious about this too. Unless the material a CD or DVD is changed, it will explode at the spin speed it takes to read data that fast.
I'm pretty sure there will only be one laser, so something clearly has to be moving for the laser to read data in different locations. A spinning disc seems most likely.
Also, I seriously doubt it will have the same data density as CD. A higher density will allow it to read more data at the same physical speed. It is what they did with hdds, dvds, hd-dvds and blu-ray.
it might use a tiny mirror like those used in laser projectors or DLP instead of moving the "spinning the disc".
from the article :
"This future type of magnetic/optical hybrid will not only potentially be thousands of times faster than any existing magnetic storage technology, it could also remove the need for the rotating disk (platter) used by every hard drive since the original IBM 305 RAMAC in the mid 1950s."
Although it is not in the article, i think that the read would also be done with a laser.
I dunno if my pr0nz collection can keep up with that...or if I can, for that matter....
o but i bet you will try..
"Laser Hard Drive boasts 1Tbits/s access time"
Yeah, bandwidth and access time are two different things, its like saying 40 MPH is a measurement of time. Honest mistake when you write like a banshee on fire.
I wish everyone would get on the same page here and stop using bits, i have no way to relate to bits for speed... when I think of hard drive speeds, its in MB/s, and when i think of internet speeds, its in KB/s.
So, lets go to google, type in "1 terabit to megabytes"
we get 1 terabit = 131 072 megabytes
Sounds fun for me.
KB/s? Sounds like someone needs to upgrade his Internet connection, hehe.
And for the bits thing... Just divide by 10.
Bytes are not that much more fun anyway:
1 terabytes = 1 099 511 627 776 bytes
Huh? Divide by 8. 1 byte = 8 bits.
@ Jay: I gots me a 15 Mbit downstream connection that peaks around 14. ah-kem... i mean 1.8MB/s down.
@Dwells55: why did you post the answer to a question no one asked? hmmm, oh well, it is the web after all.
@Dwells55: I see, I'm a moron, you were talking to Jay about his claim that 10 bits per byte.
I can see this for Digital video filming in quad HD resolution, where you need very fast access time, also in servers and large disk arrays.
but i can't see this in home computers.
I remember when people said 2mb hard drives were more than anyone would EVER need at home. I also remember when people would say 2gb was a godly amount of memory. I could go on... But as technology advances, we also demand more to do more.
I agree. fast access time for all. i retract my original post.
^ Thats a good fish.
A question in mind about super fast hard drives... If hard drives became fast enough, would that make Ram redundant? If programs are stored in ram because it allows it to be accessed faster, then surely once hard drives become super fast you would be able to do everything from there rather than loading it into the Ram? Or am I missing something?
This is more or less true. RAM is also volatile, which is an important function of it. So as the speed of data transfer to/from the hard drive approaches the speed of read/write to the RAM, the RAM isn't making the system run faster (it would actually slow it down), but the fact that cutting power resets all this temporarily stored data is important, at least in my opinion. Re-engineering of operating systems could of course compensate for that, turning a portion of the hard drive into a temporary storage area, or doing things in some other fashion, who knows.
Essentially, yes. A fundamental concept in modern computing is that memory is a hierarchy with the things closer to the speed of the CPU having less space, and getting larger the slower they are.
Most modern computers go
smallest Largest
fastest slowest
CPU register, L1 Cache, L2 Cache, L* cache, RAM, HDD
Of course by the time this increases the speed of the last thing (HDD) the other items will also probably grow in speed.
In fact, it shows signs of getting more layered, not less - In the early 90s L2 caches would have been a thing for servers. Now we have desktop computers (Phenom and i7) that have L3 caches.
The only part your confused on is the volatility of memory. If memory could be made to be non-volatile, in such a way that cutting power wouldn't destroy the current state of the machine then the computer would be in the same state it was when you plug it back in.
Non-volatile RAM would mean that your laptop would have an "instant hibernate" mode that would take zero seconds to resume from. Nifty, eh?
God, there are a lot of 12 year olds on the interwebs today.
Read it yesterday and think in the future it will replace all current hard drives including SSDs. I check that site everyday as they provide good in depth articles without talking bollacks.
I've thought that with the increasing size of optical disks, won't magnetic disks become irrelevant, but then again, with those formats, there never seems to be a very good rewritable option. Maybe that's what holding us back from this.
Will this make my Crysis run faster?
I don't think RAM will ever be redundant, because it allows for instant erasure and reset, completely independent from the amount of data it holds. Even the fastest harddisk needs time to delete files and if there is a write error, possible corruption and subsequent incapacitation of the system is permanent. With RAM, nothing is. Flick the switch and the evil spirits are gone.
(Too slow, never mind)
And who needs instant erasure and reset? Normally on a computer data is only deleted when overwritten with new data anyway.
Whether an error occurs in the RAM just before it is written to disc, while or after it is written to disc is irrelevant. An error in RAM can easily be as permanent as an error on disc.
Flicking the switch is actually the most frequent reason for data corruption. Do not flick the switch, it will make all the evil spirits come.
I don't think you really understood what I was trying to say. Some data in RAM is only loaded from HDD but not written back, ie. files critical for OS operation. If that data corrupts and the system crashes, the volatile nature of RAM comes in very handy. If the working memory was permanent and part of the HDD as a dedicated partition, it could be reset by default at every start but that would most definitely slow down the boot-up sequence, even if only indices are deleted. Besides, if the partition itself corrupted in the above process, boot-up may become impossible. The BIOS would have to be enhanced in many ways to handle all those situations. As for your other points:
>And who needs instant erasure and reset?
See above. As for large amounts of data trash, well, super computers for instance. There are computational processes that produce immense amounts of intermediate data and the ability to erase it in a glimpse after the process has ended can be extremely valuable if time and/or money play a role (which they usually do with large-scale systems).
>Flicking the switch is actually the most frequent reason for data corruption. Do not flick the switch, it will make all the evil spirits come.
In normal operation, yes. When a crash occurs, however, the CPU is halted and no disk operation can take place.