wouldnt work. the modern disks heat up mostly due to the head/platter interaction. if you COULD make heads that small (unlikely) the friction would melt the platter down. a multihead idea thats not quite that ambitious might be useful though.
On 5/17/05, Jed Rothwell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > 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 > > -- "Monsieur l'abb�, I detest what you write, but I would give my life to make it possible for you to continue to write" Voltaire
