Vinyl comeback?
Sound waves could power the future's magnetic HDDs
Our need to store data is growing at an astonishing rate. An estimated 2.7 zettabytes (2.721) of data are currently held worldwide, equivalent to several trillion bytes for every one of the seven billion people on Earth. Accessing this data quickly and reliably is essential for us to do useful things with it – the problem is, …
COMMENTS
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Friday 13th November 2015 12:35 GMT Danny 2
It's not the size of your guitar but what you do with it
I'm overly amused at data being clocked at 100mph....
90 miles an hour girl is the speed I drive
You tell me it's alright, you don't mind a little pain
You say you just want me to take you for a ride
You're just like cross-talk traffic
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Friday 13th November 2015 13:56 GMT Danny 2
Re: It's not the size of your guitar but what you do with it
You missed a joke, but that's completely forgivable as it was a very wee joke, you'd have needed an electron microscope to spot it.
When transcribing data at low power or size then cross-talk noise becomes an increasing problem. I never said it was a good joke, just trying to keep it technical here. Your reply is actually a good example of cross-talk at a human level, but hell, at least you spotted the reference, thumbs up for that!
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Friday 13th November 2015 16:02 GMT Danny 2
Re: It's not the size of your guitar but what you do with it
Hendrix was smeared as electronica when he started. You'd have loved him at the time. My fave was 'Hey Joe', as he was always at his best riffing off other peoples lyrics.
'All Along the Watchtower' was great too, except it was misinterpreted in the US and led to the Jehovah's Witnesses cult.
You may also have heard of 'Purple Haze' by Prince, a song Hendrix covered years in advance, proving he'd met the 12th Doctor during his guitar and shades phase.
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Friday 13th November 2015 11:29 GMT frank ly
Areal storage density?
Using reasonable assumptions, how would the areal storage density compare with present 'mainstream' magnetic HDDs? I assume that the device could be made in the form of a small sheet containing nanowires and surrounded/wrapped in drive and sense devices to give a standard 3.5" or 2.5" form factor.
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Friday 13th November 2015 13:12 GMT sdrinkwater99
What comes around, goes around
Nothing here that is new.
One of my first computer builds (NASCOM) used the large desktop case from a calculating machine that had Acoustic Delay Line storage for the few tens of bytes of its programming store - that was in the early 1980's. Whilst working on Flight management systems we used Bubble Memory Storage - magnetic domain bubbles storing 1/0s manipulated by rotating magnetic fields, probably still in use on the Airbus A310.
The Elliot 903 computer used magnetic core store, 1000's of micro-sized iron torroids threaded onto a matrix of wires - i still have a memory board in my loft.
It's all just got smaller. :-)
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Friday 13th November 2015 13:31 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: What comes around, goes around
"[...] Acoustic Delay Line storage for the few tens of bytes of its programming store - that was in the early 1980's."
Early valve computers like the English Electric "Deuce" in the 1950s used mercury acoustic delay lines as fast memory.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_Electric_DEUCE
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delay_line_memory#Mercury_delay_lines
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Friday 13th November 2015 20:00 GMT Alan Brown
Ahem:
"However, while solid-state devices are much faster, they have a much shorter lifespan than hard disks before becoming unreliable, and are much more expensive."
Much shorter lifespan: not in my experience (hundreds of both). There's a reason consumer hard drive warranties were slashed from 5 to 3 to 1 year whilst SSDs tend to be 3-5 years and increasing.
Much more expensive: Not for much longer. SSDs are only 2-4 times the price for consumer devices and not much above that until you get into esoteric stuff with the kinds of demands which would wear out a mechanical drive in 3 months.
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Saturday 14th November 2015 02:21 GMT FelixReg
Re: Ahem:
Alan, are you sure about the prices. It appears HD's are about $30 a T. I don't see any 4x, $120 SSDs out there. SSDs still look to be in the 10x range many years after Register commenters said HDs were dead.
Sigh, from a guy who would like to justify a little 2T+ SSD on his own machine to handle most of the non-media stuff.
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Saturday 14th November 2015 11:04 GMT Cameron Colley
Re: Ahem:
Don't SSDs have many more unused sectors though? Meaning that the drives themselves last longer, since they're over-provisioned and have no moving parts, but the actual bits themselves are less reliable than those on magnetic media. That's certainly the impression I get anyhow.
The fact this is done so well means I'm happy to trust SSDs with my data possibly even a little more than spinning rust but I think the technology itself has a shorter lifespan.
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