I've been in the IT business for quite awhile, and while our 'server
farms' have gotten considerably smaller as HD technology improved, I
was still impressed with the how much I could put on a 1GB harddrive
on my new 2400 four years ago....at least until I installed MS Office.
So, I thought it interesting this morning to see a posting on the
DuoList for a 20GB HD for only $109,
http://www.compgeeks.com/details.asp?invtid=djsa220 , which I may buy.
....followed by this Press Release from IBM, which I wish I could buy. :-)
Source: http://www.steves-digicams.com/diginews.html#ibmdisk
05-21-2001
IBM's New "Pixie Dust" To Quadruple Disk Drive Storage - 6GB
Microdrives Are Possible
SAN JOSE, Calif. (AP) - The days of 400-gigabyte hard drives in
desktop PCs may be closer than most computer users realize.
IBM Corp. says it has cracked a barrier in disk drive design - a
breakthrough that would eventually quadruple the data density of a
hard disk and give consumers improved options to store their growing
amounts of digital data.
The Armonk, N.Y.-based company is expected to announce Monday that it
is the first company to mass-produce computer hard disk drives using
a new type of magnetic coating, achieving levels of data density
previously thought to be impossible.
It's a three-atom thick layer of ruthenium, a precious metal similar
to platinum, sandwiched between two magnetic layers. Scientists at
IBM's Almaden Research Center in San Jose have dubbed the layer
"pixie dust."
Technically, the coating is called "antiferromagnetically-coupled
(AFC) media." It addresses the problem of a so-called
"superparamagnetic effect," in which data gets lost when the magnetic
regions of a disk get too small.
With the new design, hard-disk drives will be able to hold up to 100
billion bits of data per square inch. Current methods would have
maxed out at 20 to 40 billion bits of data per square inch, which is
close to the density of disk drives in use today, IBM said.
For consumers who are starting to rack up volumes of digital data
from music, photographs and video, the new development would mean
that in two years, they could have desktop computers with 400
gigabytes of storage space, IBM said.
Today, many PCs come with hard drives ranging from 10 gigabytes to 20
gigabytes. One with 40 gigabytes is on the high end.
Also, IBM said hard drives for computer notebooks would be able to
hold as much as 200 gigabytes of data, or the equivalent of 42 DVDs
or more than 300 CDs. And with IBM's one-inch Microdrive, handheld
devices would be able to hold 6 gigabytes or 13 hours of MPEG-4
compressed digital video.
The new technology may also accelerate an industry trend toward
smaller disk drives that consume less energy, or lead to more
data-intensive applications, IBM said.
In the past decade, the data density for magnetic hard drives has
doubled every 18 months. Since 1997, it's been doubling every year.
Until the "pixie dust" coating breakthrough, scientists said they
faced a design barrier they thought would halt progress. (END)
Ralph Mawyer, Jr.
San Antonio, Texas
Associate Editor
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