Toshiba claims data storage breakthrough

Toshiba claims data storage breakthrough - Techworld.com

 

Sounds like the death of the HDD might be a ways off yet.

 

however, if you read closely, the toshiba 'advance' is write-only (!!!). they have yet to read back data from the thing faster than one bit at a very slow time......... hardly useful at this point.

 

Toshiba should be focusing on SSD's, not old technology. The hard drive needs to die.

 

Sounds more like read-only, although it's hard to say. They said they got usable signals from a recording head that flew over the data, which sounds like there was already data and that they were reading it. Of course, the fact that they call it a recording head implies that it can be written to as well...

 

Could this mean 5 terabyte harddrives?

If so, then the dual HDD Dell M6500 will be able to have
10 terabyte storage
32GB ram

Cant wait

 

By the time this tech is released the M6500 will be obsolete. I second the SSD development... HDD is a last gen technology and the only thing holding us back from 5TB (or hell, 10TB) SSDs are manufacturers who want to milk the market for what it's worth with low capacity drives. link to smallest SSD

 

Too late. The problem of hard drives is not storage capacity, it's the fact that they're slow and unreliable. Any time your computer has to touch the hard drive, the time scale on which it operates drops from realm of nanoseconds (this is where the CPU, RAM and GPU live) to milliseconds -- the performance hit is on the order of 1 million.

The reliability is even worse: you just don't know when any given hard drive is going to die -- it can last 10 years or 1 week. And it's not just that you (the consumer) don't know, but big corporations (think Google), scientific labs, the military and various other organizations that store petabytes of data also don't know. This makes mass storage using hard drives a royal pain in the neck (hence the various RAID configurations).

I suppose these things will have some use for those who really need storage space, but by 2013, I think most consumers will have switched to SSDs.

 

No, it wont; for day to day tasks, 4 year old CPUs are more than enough.
Plus, CPU performances are not increasing as much now due to the power barrier.

 

The situation is not much different for SSDs. The only thing is that SSDs are more resistant to physical shocks.

Everyone needs storage space

I remember a time when my computer had 4GB of HDD and I used to boast about it; had it dual booted etc with red had linux. Now they ar making 1TB HDDs

 

No. A hard drive is a precise mechanical device (there's literally a spinning disk in there). As such, it is vulnerable to the shortcomings of all mechanical devices. Physical shock will certainly kill it, but even with ones that are housed in storage centers you have a non-trivial fraction of casualties per year. The reason is that the manufacturers can only align the parts to a limited degree -- it's good enough for most drives for a while, but it is not perfect and there is a random element to it (some will be a lot better than others).

Solid state drives are different in that they're purely electronic -- there are no moving parts. They're still not eternal because you can only write to each cell so many times, but with quality hardware, the chance that a drive will die 2 months after purchase (as one of my colleague's hard drives recently did) can be made astronomically small. As the hardware evolves, it may also be possible to tell the user when the SSD is getting close to failure (this is important because the data lost when a hard drive dies is often orders of magnitude more valuable than the drive itself).

This is not to say that current SSDs don't experience sudden death. The devices are still relatively new and the firmware and controllers are imperfect so there can still be problems and of course nothing can save you from lousy hardware (e.g. Nvidia's GPU debacle), but there is no theoretical limitation on their reliability as there is with hard drives.

 

Yea, I was talking about current SSDs

 

15TB in a D900F... but seriously , they need to focus on SSD's... HDD's are becomming obsolete.