# Hard Rectangular Drive Could be the Hard Disk  Answer to SSDs



## alexp999 (Jun 26, 2009)

A company called DataSlide has decided its not time for mechanical disk drives also known as hard disk drives (HDD) to roll over and die with SSDs beating them in just about every aspect other than price. The key aspect of the new technology is that it does not require the data platter to be spun like conventional hard disk drives do. For a start this provides savings in power consumption and due to the use of magnetic recording media as found in hard disk drives should allow the hard rectanguar drive (HRD) to be cheaper than an SSD or at least provide significantly more usable space for your money. A diagram explaining the technology and the manufacturers details and specifications follow.



 

 

 




DataSlide's Hard Rectangular Drive (HRD) capitalizes on standard base process technologies to create a dramatically new way to store and retrieve data with magnetic media:

1. Leverage LCD process
2. Use standard HDD sputtering/plating MEMS process
3. Use HDD perpendicular media DSSC/Oerlikon-Balzers coatings

DataSlide applies technology in new, patented ways to achieve unprecedented high performance
*160,000 IOPS & 500MB/sec and low power <4 Watts for a magnetic storage device:*

1. A piezoelectric actuator keeps the rectangular media in precise motion
2. A diamond solid lubricant coating protects the surfaces for years of worry free service
3. A massively parallel 2D array of magnetic heads reads from or writes to up to 64 embedded heads at a time

*View at TechPowerUp Main Site*


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## alexp999 (Jun 26, 2009)

Thanks to CrAsHnBuRnXp for sending this in


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## InnocentCriminal (Jun 26, 2009)

Now that is interesting, if these are slightly more expensive than regular HDDs but far cheaper than SSDs, then these could prove successful. I look forward to seeing reviews.


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## kyle2020 (Jun 26, 2009)

+1 on that criminal. This seems promising, cracking bit of news there alex


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## alexp999 (Jun 26, 2009)

InnocentCriminal said:


> Now that is interesting, if these are slightly more expensive than regular HDDs but far cheaper than SSDs, then these could prove successful. I look forward to seeing reviews.



According to a slide on the site, thats the market they are aiming at as they make a point SSDs are expensive.

Fingers crossed.


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## human_error (Jun 26, 2009)

ooo this looks very interesting - this seems to have come out of nowhere and could be a very nice stopgap tech until SSDs become super capacity and relatively low price.

Plus 500MB/sec is amazing from a single drive - raid 0 a couple for 1GB/sec read speeds *faints from thought of those speeds*

Of course SSDs will still have better latencies but we could now see these with faster speeds vs. the better latencies of SSDs - decisions, decisions...

Thanks for the info Alexp


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## Papahyooie (Jun 26, 2009)

Im not quite sure I understand the tech just right... but wouldnt this also eliminate the drive spinning, and cut down on drive death from vibration / movement, making them good for netbooks, etc, just like SSD?


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## Black Hades (Jun 26, 2009)

Well I guess you CAN reinvent the wheel after all

EDIT:


Papahyooie said:


> Im not quite sure I understand the tech just right... but wouldnt this also eliminate the drive spinning, and cut down on drive death from vibration / movement, making them good for netbooks, etc, just like SSD?



It still vibrates, the media platter moves, and more than before it's in direct contact with lubricant solid matter...that concerns me because there is no such thing as 0% friction and heat and wear and tear could still occur. But what do I know I'm not an engineer.

I hope it doesnt hum or even worse buzz


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## Bundy (Jun 26, 2009)

Black Hades said:


> Well I guess you CAN reinvent the wheel after all
> 
> EDIT:
> 
> ...



There is always "something" they don't mention.


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## h3llb3nd4 (Jun 26, 2009)

wow awesome
need reviews


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## Papahyooie (Jun 26, 2009)

ah i see the oscilliating part now. Piezo? Isnt that like tiny little movements caused by electric current? Like a piezo speaker... voltage spike would not be good in that case... im sure they know more than me though lol.


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## Black Hades (Jun 26, 2009)

Bundy said:


> There is always "something" they don't mention.



As long as they state "HDD reliability or better".... 

Seriously I imagine it's bound to produce more noise than a SSD. The quantification of that "more" remains open to debate & tests.


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## Cuzza (Jun 26, 2009)

Now the hard part: get it to market before SSDs become properly affordable.

lol, they have reinvented the wheel, and made it square! seems that with those 64 heads one on each sector, the "disk" still has to move quite a long way, about 1cm? or am i getting this wrong?


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## $ReaPeR$ (Jun 26, 2009)

+1 to that cuzza i really like this post it looks very promising for our storage future.


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## Mussels (Jun 26, 2009)

i have no idea how this works.


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## MopeyMartian (Jun 26, 2009)

Bundy said:


> There is always "something" they don't mention.



AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!  

It will be louder than any fan you've ever heard and we'll nickname it "The Mosquito".


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## h3llb3nd4 (Jun 26, 2009)

Mussels said:


> i have no idea how this works.



Me too,

is it the data which moves to the heads?


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## Mussels (Jun 26, 2009)

h3llb3nd4 said:


> Me too,
> 
> is it the data which moves to the heads?



magic. just magic.


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## Bjorn_Of_Iceland (Jun 26, 2009)

vapor time


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## MopeyMartian (Jun 26, 2009)

I think I get it...

There are read/write heads covering the top and bottom layers while the middle layer moves only at the nano-scale.  The data "goes to" the heads but there are so many heads the data layer hardly moves at all.


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## Black Hades (Jun 26, 2009)

MopeyMartian said:


> AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
> 
> It will be louder than any fan you've ever heard and we'll nickname it "The Mosquito".



Remember floppy disk write noise? Banish that thought now...


The lubricant is a solid synth diamond coating that "protects the surfaces for years of worry free service". cant we just keep them separated by a nice vacuum that.. ahem... I dont know is in theory frictionless?
I'm not assuming I know better than ppl that actually know what can or cant be done of course.


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## MopeyMartian (Jun 26, 2009)

If it's nanotech then we're probably referring to diamonds on a molecular level.   Perhaps some kind of thin diamond paste, or...    something.


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## Mussels (Jun 26, 2009)

MopeyMartian said:


> If it's nanotech then we're probably referring to diamonds on a molecular level.   Perhaps some kind of thin diamond paste, or...    something.



or as i said, magic.


seriously, i can normally keep up with tech and figure it out fast... this one just makes me


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## Cuzza (Jun 26, 2009)

No i was wrong it only moves a tiny amount. here's the low down.

The rectangle is split into 64 sectors, each with one head. These can all read or write at once. But the head is not fixed. There are 1000s of them on the surface made of semiconductor, but only one of these works at any one time within the sector. Which one is used is addressed by row/column. This allows the "coarse" control over the movement around the "disk".

In conjunction with this the whole "disk" moves by the piezo actuators. This allows the "fine" control over the movement of the deads to the desired location.


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## Black Hades (Jun 26, 2009)

MopeyMartian said:


> If it's nanotech then we're probably referring to diamonds on a molecular level.   Perhaps some kind of thin diamond paste, or...    something.



 It states on their site:
"A diamond solid lubricant coating protects the surfaces for years of worry free service"
 It cant be a paste because nothing is more abrasive as loose diamond particles. That's what they coat on power cutting tool blades. Kind of not the effect one would want on a sensitive magnetic media.
Also even if on a molecular level the diamond coating is perfectly plane, heat still occurs because of fast moving tangent surfaces. Where there's heat there's entropy.


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## LaidLawJones (Jun 26, 2009)

So then according to the plan view, there is a spring located on the right side that would push  against the spring bar on the left side. They then allow this bar to arc positive and negative, controlled somehow,piezeo?, allowing the media to move but the heads remain stationary. This must have some noise factor as you can not vibrate a bar, probably at least several thousand times per second, without noise. On the bright side if they keep it standard size, there are a lot of HDD noise dampening products out there.


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## Evo85 (Jun 26, 2009)

Interesting stuff. Lets hope it lives up to the hype...


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## tkpenalty (Jun 26, 2009)

At that scale i'd call this an SSD... with 64 sectors, it is just as complicated or even more complicated than SSDs to manage, and they don't seem to mention that.


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## InnocentCriminal (Jun 26, 2009)

tkpenalty said:


> At that scale i'd call this an SSD...



It's not Solid State though.


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## tkpenalty (Jun 26, 2009)

InnocentCriminal said:


> It's not Solid State though.



Considering the fabrication process its almost solid state. I'd think it would be wiser to produce magnetic memory semiconductors that use a platter for the memory. But atm, this would NOT be cheaper to produce. I dont know how 64 heads are supposed to communicate with the system without a RAID-like setup inside; its 64 Hdds in one hdd. 

This isnt reinventing the wheel, this is using caterpillar legs instead.


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## Weer (Jun 26, 2009)

So, wait.. are these better than SSD's or in between HDD's and SSD's?


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## h3llb3nd4 (Jun 26, 2009)

Weer said:


> So, wait.. are these better than SSD's or in between HDD's and SSD's?



sounds very "in-between" for me...


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## qwerty_lesh (Jun 26, 2009)

Still, they rely on heads, so if the HRD suffers excessive shock, the heads will be ruined, especially if one is reading or writing, once a single head is damaged, consider that out of that sector, there will be multiple cylinders which are no longer read/writable, and who knows how it would function with a few bad heads, if the read/write rates get crippled or if its able to effectively function with bad heads out of use.
These will be a data recovery experts worst nightmare I bet, I do hope these are as promising as the pictures state, high speed, cheap, large storage, my god, if it were true you would just buy like six and raid 0 +1 them together and never have to worry about speed/performance or capacity for a very long time.


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## nemesis.ie (Jun 26, 2009)

This tech was being touted 1 or 2 years ago. Is it nearly ready to hit the stores would be question I would ask?

It would be great to see it out soon as the more competition (faster speeds/density) the better the pricing should be.


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## peach1971 (Jun 26, 2009)

I´ve heard about this technology about FIVE YEARS ago (I swear!) and I was wondering when anything new about this would appear in the media. Aha, finally in 2009...


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## DanishDevil (Jun 26, 2009)

I'll take a Zune HD with a side of nVidia Tegra, multitouch, OLED, and a 200GB HRD please


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## Mussels (Jun 26, 2009)

DanishDevil said:


> I'll take a Zune HD with a side of nVidia Tegra, multitouch, OLED, and a 200GB HRD please



you forgot wireless N w/ wireless HDMI


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## DanishDevil (Jun 26, 2009)

Well luckily, it will have WiFi (G most likely) and HDMI through a dock, but other than the HRD, everything is confirmed as specs for the 16GB starting between $250 and $300.  But this is a thread about the confuzzling HRDs.  I'm just saying if these prove to be the true HDD killers, they would be GREAT in portable media players


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## Suijin (Jun 26, 2009)

Black Hades said:


> It states on their site:
> "A diamond solid lubricant coating protects the surfaces for years of worry free service"
> It cant be a paste because nothing is more abrasive as loose diamond particles. That's what they coat on power cutting tool blades. Kind of not the effect one would want on a sensitive magnetic media.
> Also even if on a molecular level the diamond coating is perfectly plane, heat still occurs because of fast moving tangent surfaces. Where there's heat there's entropy.



Diamond as a material property has one of the lowest friction surfaces known.  Diamond also has one of the highest heat conductivities known.  Also a very good electrical insulator, and it's opne the the hardest materials also.

It does have drawbacks of course:  It's expensive to make, and it generally requires high temperatures to deposit which is often bad for what you to put it on and can cause high stress in the material at room temperature.


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## Sasqui (Jun 26, 2009)

Black Hades said:


> Well I guess you CAN reinvent the wheel after all
> 
> EDIT:
> 
> ...



With 1 head per sector?  Yes, it's a good idea from a performance perspective, but I see too many moving parts.  I'd be surprised if this becomes reality, and if it does... it won't be like sliced bread.


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## Easo (Jun 26, 2009)

I would want one working example...


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## Kantastic (Jun 26, 2009)

This is some amazing stuff. It looks quite promising, can't wait until it's on the Egg. ^_^


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## Mussels (Jun 26, 2009)

in the fourth picture they say "HDD reliability or better"


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## MopeyMartian (Jun 26, 2009)

Suijin said:


> Diamond as a material property has one of the lowest friction surfaces known.  Diamond also has one of the highest heat conductivities known.  Also a very good electrical insulator, and it's opne the the hardest materials also.
> 
> It does have drawbacks of course:  It's expensive to make, and it generally requires high temperatures to deposit which is often bad for what you to put it on and can cause high stress in the material at room temperature.



A couple years ago I read about a new technique for making synthetic diamonds that is supposed to be drastically cheaper than traditional methods.  I wonder if that is the process being used in this case.

I could be mistaken, but isn't there a diamond based TIM on the market?


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## Mussels (Jun 26, 2009)

MopeyMartian said:


> I could be mistaken, but isn't there a diamond based TIM on the market?



there is. but its performance is pretty crap compared to the good pastes, like AS5 and MX2.


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## ShadowFold (Jun 26, 2009)

Finally. Something afordable that can beat my Seagate 7200.10RPM  I really hope the high capacity ones are cheap!!!!


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## MilkyWay (Jun 26, 2009)

i dont care what it is or how it works just that it loads my data faster and transfer rates are much improved because data is getting larger and it needs to keep up with speeds

SSD is just a huge SD card lol maybe not exactly the same but same principles

i want programs to load faster and load times in programs reduced

someone explain how it works is it like hundreds of heads reading or something?


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## Mussels (Jun 26, 2009)

MilkyWay said:


> i dont care what it is or how it works just that it loads my data faster and transfer rates are much improved because data is getting larger and it needs to keep up with speeds
> 
> SSD is just a huge SD card lol maybe not exactly the same but same principles
> 
> ...



the only way i can comprehend it, is that instead of one large circle, you get lots of small squares. many many heads that dont move (say, 16 per 'platter') - they dont cover the whole area, but with the platter being able to move small amounts each one covers enough area that the whole thing can be read in one combination or another.

get enough of em together, and you can read massive amounts of data simultaneously. 

seriously, i could be totally tripping on this. its rather late/early in the morning here.


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## Perra (Jun 26, 2009)

Wow, cool tech but it still remains to be seen how well it works. I sure hope it can live up to the numbers they tout and that it gets a reasonable price.


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## thebeephaha (Jun 26, 2009)

ShadowFold said:


> Finally. Something afordable that can beat my Seagate 7200.10RPM  I really hope the high capacity ones are cheap!!!!



Yea but almost anything now beats a 7200.10 on the cheap...


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## ShadowFold (Jun 26, 2009)

But not enough to make me upgrade


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## TheLaughingMan (Jun 27, 2009)

*I'm in*

When does this come out.  It sounds all great and stuff, but unless this is due to come out in the next year or so, SSD will be cheap enough (hopefully) by then to compete price wise.....which will create competition making everything cheaper and better.

This is getting good.


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## LittleLizard (Jun 27, 2009)

i wonder what would happen if 1 head get broke by, lets say, vibration or a fall.


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## Cuzza (Jun 27, 2009)

LittleLizard said:


> i wonder what would happen if 1 head get broke by, lets say, vibration or a fall.



I'd say the area that head addresses is gone. For good. Better hope it's nothing important. Mind you, that's what RAID is for.


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## GunsAblazin (Jun 27, 2009)

Black Hades said:


> Well I guess you CAN reinvent the wheel after all
> 
> EDIT:
> It still vibrates, the media platter moves, and more than before it's in direct contact with lubricant solid matter...that concerns me because there is no such thing as 0% friction and heat and wear and tear could still occur. But what do I know I'm not an engineer.
> I hope it doesnt hum or even worse buzz



LOL they pretty much did reinvent the wheel. The platters are made of glass so there's verry little friction or heat. I don't understand why they had to be in contact in the first place. 

Technically if they added more heads to a standard HDD and slowed down the motor, that should have the same result - with less friction. All they really need is a way to replace the motor which is primarily what fails.


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## TheLaughingMan (Jun 27, 2009)

> 0% friction and heat and wear and tear could still occur



Well yeah.  That is true for everything including SSD.  While it may seem strange that their is physical contact within the drive, but we are talking about "Rectangular" Disk Drives.  This was some strange stuff from the beginning.  I am sure they had some kind of reason for doing it the way they did it.



> Technically if they added more heads to a standard HDD



I am not sure, please correct if I am wrong, but I think they tried that at some point.  Adding extra heads created, more heat, more power consumption, and increased risk of head crashes and mechanical failures.  I believe developers like Seagate, WD, etc. developed other ways to increase performance and reduce friction.


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## Steevo (Jun 27, 2009)

Sasqui said:


> With 1 head per sector?  Yes, it's a good idea from a performance perspective, but I see too many moving parts.  I'd be surprised if this becomes reality, and if it does... it won't be like sliced bread.



Same thing they said about perp drives, and heat drives, however they are fast reliable, and cheap now.



GunsAblazin said:


> LOL they pretty much did reinvent the wheel. The platters are made of glass so there's verry little friction or heat. I don't understand why they had to be in contact in the first place.
> 
> Technically if they added more heads to a standard HDD and slowed down the motor, that should have the same result - with less friction. All they really need is a way to replace the motor which is primarily what fails.



No, usually it is the platter media, the heads, or the PCB and related components. I have only seen one really old IBM drive die from spindle motor failure. Many from heads being damaged, or from lightning and or power surges taking out the heads, and a few from the PCB and or related components being fried.


When the HDD is spinning the heads float on a airfoil surface that is near frictionless, it is the contaminants, bumps, drops, and the startup and shutdown that damages and wears out heads, and causes damage to the disk itself.


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## 1c3d0g (Jun 28, 2009)

They can't "outspeed" a chip. Ever. SSD's will crush whatever hard disk (or hard disk-type media) someone invents in the future. Let's face it, the time has come to bury unreliable magnetic media once and for all. This announcement is nothing more than hype from desperate hard disk companies, unwilling to change for the better.


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## alexp999 (Jun 28, 2009)

1c3d0g said:


> They can't "outspeed" a chip. Ever. SSD's will crush whatever hard disk (or hard disk-type media) someone invents in the future. Let's face it, the time has come to bury unreliable magnetic media once and for all. This announcement is nothing more than hype from desperate hard disk companies, unwilling to change for the better.



I'm interested to know why you think magnetic media cannot ever "outspeed" a chip as you put it.

Are you an SSD/HDD/HRD engineer perhaps?


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## tkpenalty (Jun 28, 2009)

alexp999 said:


> I'm interested to know why you think magnetic media cannot ever "outspeed" a chip as you put it.
> 
> Are you an SSD/HDD/HRD engineer perhaps?



Electrical signals move at the speed of light, while for a hdd/hrd to move it's platter into the read head's position is nowhere near that speed. 

Doesn't take much common sense to figure that one out.


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## alexp999 (Jun 28, 2009)

tkpenalty said:


> Electrical signals move at the speed of light, while for a hdd/hrd to move it's platter into the read head's position is nowhere near that speed.
> 
> Doesn't take much common sense to figure that one out.



We still cant predict the future or where technology will take us.

Why cant there be some invention that can read magnetically recorded data faster than a chip?

Its good to keep your mind open 

Oh and for the record electricity moves really slow take the following from wiki as an example:



			
				Wikipedia said:
			
		

> As a numerical example,for a copper wire of 1 square mm area, carrying a current of 3 amperes, the drift velocity of electrons would be about 0.00028 metres per second (or just about an hour to travel one metre).


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## Mussels (Jun 28, 2009)

tkpenalty said:


> Electrical signals move at the speed of light, while for a hdd/hrd to move it's platter into the read head's position is nowhere near that speed.
> 
> Doesn't take much common sense to figure that one out.



electrical signals move at the speed of electricity. optical signals move at the speed of light.


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## Perra (Jun 28, 2009)

1c3d0g said:


> They can't "outspeed" a chip. Ever. SSD's will crush whatever hard disk (or hard disk-type media) someone invents in the future. Let's face it, the time has come to bury unreliable magnetic media once and for all. This announcement is nothing more than hype from desperate hard disk companies, unwilling to change for the better.



You're probably right but until SSD's come down to a more reasonable price-level, I'm all for this kind of stuff. Can probably be a perfect stepping-stone from HDD to SSD.

If it ever gets to stores that is


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## Mussels (Jun 28, 2009)

SSD's may be able to be faster in access times, but these things appear to be winning already in throughput and IOPS.

who cares if they get overtaken - you wouldnt stop buying Nvidia just because AMD released ONE video card that was faster, once... you choose whats best AT THE TIME.


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## naram-sin (Jun 28, 2009)

Mussels said:


> in the fourth picture they say "HDD reliability or better"



I guess that they are referring to MTBF, most likely.


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## deaffob (Jun 29, 2009)

jesus look at the power consumtion


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## zads (Jun 29, 2009)

Magnetic hard drives will not be replaced by SSDs for the long foreseeable future.
The capacity/$ will never be competitive for SSDs.
This is an industry consensus, and one that I agree upon (and I'm in charge of the SSD line at my company).
SSDs have their place in high performance systems, hard drives have their place in high capacity systems. 
While this idea HRD is interesting, it will be a number of years before even a workable solution comes out. 




Mussels said:


> electrical signals move at the speed of electricity. optical signals
> move at the speed of light.



electric fields propogate at the speed of light. 



alexp999 said:


> ...
> Oh and for the record electricity moves really slow take the following from wiki as an example:
> 
> 
> ...



Careful now, the drift velocity of electrons is not equal to the "speed of electricity"...
Electric field propogates at the speed of light (through the wire almost instantaneously)
Without getting into the electron physics, just imagine the wire is a pipe filled with water.. 

The electric field corollary would be water pressure. 
Turn on the light switch (open the water valve), and the electrons start flowing almost immediately through the entire pipe (the water pressure pushes the standing water out the end of the pipe pre-filled with water almost immediately). 

So here's a thought question:
If the drift velocity of electrons is 1m/hour, why doesn't it take 4 hours to turn on the light bulb from your light switch?



Answer? 
Because the wire isn't empty- the copper atoms are already "filled with electrons", just like a filled water pipe.


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## hat (Jun 29, 2009)

Electricity is pretty fast... ever seen lightning? 

Regular hard drives are better atm because they offer much more space per dollar than SSDs. There is one 512GB SSD on newegg for $1575. Or, for $240, you could buy the 2TB Western Digital drive... or for $480 get two and use RAID 1 for data redundancy


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## alexp999 (Jun 29, 2009)

zads said:


> Magnetic hard drives will not be replaced by SSDs for the long foreseeable future.
> The capacity/$ will never be competitive for SSDs.
> This is an industry consensus, and one that I agree upon (and I'm in charge of the SSD line at my company).
> SSDs have their place in high performance systems, hard drives have their place in high capacity systems.
> ...



Yes I was taught that analogy, it still doesnt change the "speed" of electricity


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## Hayder_Master (Jun 29, 2009)

so other chance for physical drives


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## theeldest (Jun 30, 2009)

Sasqui said:


> With 1 head per sector?  Yes, it's a good idea from a performance perspective, but I see too many moving parts.  I'd be surprised if this becomes reality, and if it does... it won't be like sliced bread.



There would be fewer moving parts than a traditional HDD because the read heads don't move, and the platter oscillates instead of rotating.

Also you won't need to worry about the heads floating above the platter and damaging the data if they touch because the heads are always directly contacting the platter.

And you don't need to worry about that stupid torque on the left side of your laptop when your HDD is running.


I think that the trick here would be to get two oscillating platters in a disc. If they oscillate opposite each other, there's no net momentum. And if we can speed everything up to about 30khz, you won't hear a thing (unless you've got freakishly good hearing that is)


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