Jones Beene wrote:
The price/performance ratio between that first one and this new one is... lets see 8000 times more storage - for about twenty times less $$ = 160,000:1 . . .
I don't think there has been anything which can match this phenomenal change in value in the history of manufacturing...way beyond Moore's law.
That's true. It is about an order of magnitude better than the improvements in semiconductor RAM, which is the most comparable device. (They are both relatively simple, and they both have the same structure repeated millions of times, unlike devices such as CPU chips which have increased in speed and complexity as well as the number of transistors.) RAM has increased from ~64 KB to 1 GB, a factor of 16,000, for about the same price.
Experts did not expect this progress. Back in the 90s the trade mags were predicting that any day now hard disks would be rendered obsolete by solid-state memory, but instead we have 1.5 GB microdisks for music players. Around 2000 someone predicted the upper limits of hard disk would be reached when it takes many hours just to format a multi-terabyte device. Sooner or later disks will be replaced by some sort of three-dimensional solid-state memory with no moving parts, but who knows when.
I think many people are beginning to reach the limits of disk storage requirements. I have not filled out more than a third of a disk in several years. If I were a manufacturer trying to compete in the hard disk business, rather than increasing storage capacity I would try to differentiate my product by giving it unique characteristics. I would revive a long obsolete hard disk design I saw on a Data General MV 8000 back in the 1980s. It was a 20 MB disk with a row of multiple immobile heads on each platter. I mean the heads did not move: track to track seek time was zero.
To bring that idea up to date, you would develop an array of microscopic read/write heads that covered the entire surface of the disk, with one head per track. From the Maxtor.com site, I gather that a modern disk has 16,000 tracks. If you could make an array of 1,600 heads (spread in a staggered array across the entire top surface), that would give you one-tenth the capacity of a modern disk, or perhaps 25 GB, but way faster. It could be used for Windows swap space or something like that. Average seek time for a modern disk is ~9 ms. It would be zero instead, leaving only rotational latency, around 4.2 ms. You could activate all read-write heads at the same time and format the entire disk (or erase it) in the time it takes to rotate once (8.4 ms, or 60 seconds/7,200 rpm). With a new interface you could even write data to hundreds or maybe thousands of read-write head directly from RAM with DMA. That's what the DG computer did, as I recall.
- Jed
