As the list of "awesome things that won't ever happen" grows
ever longer, we've got a brilliant team of French physicists who have seemingly concocted a method for storing and retrieving data on hard discs that's around 100,000 times faster than usual. Yes, 100,000x. The trick is based around
spintronics, an almost mythical procedure that involves the use of lasers, magnetic sensors and mutant abilities to shuffle data around at a dizzying rate. This particular method, however, improves upon the comparatively sluggish attempts of the past, as it uses photons that "modify the state of the electrons' magnetization on the storage surface." In layman's terms, this all means that the HDD you buy in 2098 will probably operate significantly faster than the one you picked up during Circuit City's going-out-of-business sale. Got it? Good.
posted Jun 7th 2009 5:21AM
Sounds like a technology that's very very far away...
My eyes!! argh my eyes! save them.
Beat me to it. The only reason I came here to comment was because that picture made my eyes hurt.
AAAAAHHH!!!! IT'S SPINNING!!!!! I'M DIZZY!!!!!!!
Just like 3D TV.... I'll believe it when I see it.
2098 is a long ways off, bud…
Nothing annoys me more than when a survey comes floating across my screen...
But on topic, won't this slow down the rate at which we get solid state storage perfected? Why improve on a tech that's going to be obsolete in the end anyway? Just go ahead and get to solid state and get it over with...
Maybe this could be implemented in some in SSDs. Just speculation though
There's nothing wrong with old technology that is both proven and cheap. Heck, data storage on tape is still going precisely because it is cheap despite the fact that no one would consider bringing it close to anything other than a backup system. Mechanical hard drives will likely be with us for many years to come and improving their performance will be welcomed. You might well have SSD in your desktop PC but archival systems probably won't for many years due to the sheer cost. For example, I have an image archival system at work that hold many terrabytes of data - I dread to think what the cost of SSD storage for all that would be and being able to both add to it and retrieve images faster would be appreciated by the end-users.
Yes, because while this group is researching hard disks, nobody else can do any other research into other data storage methods...
uhhh... tape drives are not used because they're cheap; I've never met anyone else at the consumer grade with a tape drive (I had one back in the 90s that used cassettes for media just as a curio) because the drives themselves are very expensive. The media is fairly cheap, although only if you're going to use both sides. Tape drives are used for backup because they last a long time and it's easy to use them for automated backups (opposed to DVDs, which also don't last very long)
(a) This isn't engineers talking about a product they're working on, it's physicists talking about potential applications for their basic research.
(b) Even if it were engineers, it's an entirely separate field (photonics) from traditional electrical engineering and comparing the two would be like saying "why work on electric vehicles when it's just going to take focus away from perfecting combustion engines?"
@John:
You can also store the data tapes at a warehouse in New Jersey, if in case say someone happends to fly a plane into the building. Then you can drive some semitruck server farms up to the warehouse and have the data back up and running in a day.
I dream the day something which delivers a technology breakthrough is actually commercialized in a very short time and for a sensible prize.
Scib, when are you coming to my car? =(
Sweet! Now I"ll have something to look forward to for my 111th birthday.
er...... when are we getting bio-gel packs that store data?
Most of us get issued with those at birth...
Spintronics? Sounds like Bulltronics to me.
Sounds like quantum computing to me.
Which sounds like bull anyway.
There is hardly anything 'mythical' about spintronics...
Yeah but it sounds much cooler if you don't say this...
Plus it's french people so there work must be pointless/born-to-fail at some point.
re: "awesome things that won't ever happen" statement
I do declare that there should be a tag of that manner, just so if we feel like dreaming about tech that won't happen/ happen for a long time; but would be awesome if it did come, out we can look and get some "ooh ahh" action happening
Where's my Memristors already.
You spin me right round, baby... ?
if you stared at the picture long enough you can spot chuck norris hiding behind one of the platters...
STOP getting ahead of yourselfs!!!! to begin with all the world population is going to be extint by then... or there wont even be enough metal to make the dam thing.... OR we will have some sort of quantum physics mombo jombo that will let us store information on the air or some piece of wood and it will be 1000 tb or so... OR store information in our brains OR store information on some sort of highly advanced SSD.... maybe the world will find meaning and peace by then and then we will stop using computers and stuff... just meditate all day long....
ONE thing is for sure.... 90% or more of the poeple who read this right now will be dead of one reason or another... most likely a world war 3 and 4 followed by zombies followed by human eating aliens followed by and asteroid killing half the world which includes the zombies, human eating aliens and the Palestinians and Chinese... OOOOOOH.. also most of you will go into an experimental freezeing station (being the geeks we are) thinking we will be awaken 991 years later (yes, futurama). but it will be a failed experiment and we will die around 5 months after deep freeze... yes.. WE survived 5 months in deep freeze.
i forgot to say that other than the comment i made above.. maybe they are speculating it way ahead of time... if technology keeps growing at the present rate we might have some prototyes by 2020 or something.. maybe not going 100k times faster but maybe 30k.... or something.... thats still way faster than any ssd out there... he he.
Spintronics are already being used in HDD's... the reason for storage density in HDD's rising is because they use a component called a GMR (giant magneto-resistor) which a French physicist discovered and won the physics Nobel prize for in 2007.
Why don't they focus on SSD rather than HDD? HDD's have enormous storage density as opposed to SSD's (at least right now). MOreover, HDD's are very cheap per GB and SSD's aren't. If you want speed, get an SSD, if you want a lot of storage for cheap, get an HDD. Plus, industry-class HDD's can easily go head-to-head with SSD speeds and they have lower bit-error-rates (BER).
Finally, HDD and all magnetic based technology is more robust and work in environments where silicon just fails. For example, when HDD's are taken to space, the magnetic parts work just fine, it's the silicon controller chips that fail. If you replaced HDD's with SSD's in space, you'd find yourself with a lot useless silicon which is irreparable.
Also, if microwave assisted HHD's are ever figured out, storage density of HDD's will skyrocket.
I wanna get off the Gravitron!