IBM's "Pixie Dust" Drives Improved

jeffroe writes "Infoworld has an article stating that IBM has enhanced it's 'Pixie Dust' technology yet again. The areal density has improved to 70gb per square inch! Apparently that means 80gb drives for laptops." IBM's also predicted hard drives to have 100gb per square inch by 2003. Storage space just keeps increasing.

Who cares

[geek]

The storage capacity we have now is adaquate for at least another few years. I don't know anyone that uses more than 60 gigs, and they are few and far between.

What we need is faster drives. I'm personally sick of how slow ATA drives are. Every other aspect of computers has made leaps and bounds in speed, with this one exception. Why? A fast hard drive makes all the difference in system speed.

Aren't they getting out?

[Faizdog]

Isn't IBM leaving the Harddrive market? [slashdot.org] I'm glad they're working on this though. IBM has recently been on the cutting edge of personal computing devices with being the driving force beyond harddrive research and technoligies such as MRAM.

Re:p0rn

[Trusty Penfold]

why else would you need an 80GB drive in a laptop?

Movies. Why pay for pay-per-view when you're on a business trip when you can bring 50 with you.

Of course, some of them may be porn, so your argument is partially correct.

What about heat/reliability/power usage?

[Bronster]

While it's cool to see such big numbers making it into notebook computers, the flip side is probably going to be more power consumption and more waste heat.

I have an IBM 75Gb 7200RPM drive, and I wouldn't dream of running it without a fan any more (after the first one died from overheating). Sure it's nice, but you don't really need 80Gb of pr0n and MP3s (sorry OGGs for those politically correct types) with you all the time. That's what the SAN you keep under the desk at home is for.

Warranty anyone?

[T-Kir]

Storage space just keeps increasing

Yeah, and the Warranty durations are a shrinking (1 year now for most new drives?)... how long before the end is nigh for magnetic storage? Any progress on more solid state media (so I don't have to worry about accidents involving magnets!).

Re:If these laptops are at college...

[lowtekneq]

AIM? I happen to be in a highschool were students have laptops, and are connected to the internet via 802.11b. I'm also an "assistant admin" (whatever you want to call it) and from the amount of bandwidth that is being sucked up, and from what i see in class, most people are downloading mp3s. Anime or video of any sort isn't so much of a problem because someone can't download that in one sitting.

What to use this space for.

[FuzzyDaddy]

I like to think of it as a challenge. I just bought a new hard drive, and I can save all my photographs on them. (Not that I don't need to back up to CD-ROM...)

What to do with 10 times as much storage? I could start keeping home videos on there. Or store all the network traffic that comes on and off my computer indefinitely. Or keep track of the voltage waveform coming in off the power lines, and post processing it after a year to look for frequency shifts.

But this talk of "no-one but video pirates would need this" is silly. Just give it to me, I'll think of something.

Re:I did

[FuegoFuerte]

Think for a second... 10,000 RPM SCSI drive 5 years ago... how big was it? What was the areal density? I'm not going to bother to do the math right now, but a 40 GB, 4200 rpm laptop drive may very well have the same I/O speeds (or a lot better) as a 2.1GB, 10,000 rpm scsi drive from 5 years ago would've had. As areal density increases, I/O speed increases when linear velocity remains constant. Think about it, and don't hurt yourself. :).

Re:Who cares

[rtaylor]

The only way to speed up harddrives is to pass more bits infront of the drive head in a set amount of time.

Add more platters and/or readheads, spin them faster, or compress the bits so that more pass per revolution as more fit in the same space.

Since anything faster than 10k seems to heat up in a hurry you won't find them in a home system soon. Nor will you find 'large sized' drives soon. Good chance platters could become thinner, and put more into the housing but thats an expensive proposition. Data compression (physical, not mathematical) like IBM is doing is a very effective method of complying with your request.

Re:Speed

[AJWM]

But a drive running at 7200 RPM at greater densities can be faster than a 10000 RPM drive at lower densities

Faster at transfer rate, yes.

Faster at track-to-track seek time, very likely (tracks being closer together).

But faster in rotational latency, which is the major bottleneck, no fscking way.

Moving parts bad! Solid State good!

[Syn Ack]

Enough with storage space! I don't care about having a 480GB drive. I want a drive that doesn't have any moving parts. A 100% solid state harddrive for the cost of a regular IDE. I'd even pay twice or three times as much to have 40-60-80GB worth of solid state goodness.

My computer sits here beside me and the only mechanical part that will destroy it if it fails is the spinning disk inside the drive. Sure there are still fans but my computer will quickly notice that and shutdown. However if the drive fails, you're toast.

I know we still need storage but can't some of these cycles be put into getting us off the old pre-space age magnetic disc technology and get us into something that doesn't need moving parts!

Come on IBM, where's my Holographic or Memory Based solid state storage. I don't care if it's twice the size of my current drive either, I just don't want any more moving parts!

Syn Ack

Re:Reliability

[gmack]

Yes but redundant is only usefull when youve taken other steps to make everything else as reliable as possible.

I simply don't buy the statement that 2 unreliable parts can be combined into someting that's more reliable than something that's better than both of them in the first place.

I've watched not one but 2 high profile projects have multi day outages because they bet their buisness on IDE raid.

Re:Backup

[Akumapwr]

You can find a DVD burner for less than $199 if you shop around well. Also DVD-R media is less than $1 from ebay or some online sites. So let's do the math..

$199 for a DVD burner
50x $1 disks

250$ for 50 x 4.5gb = 225gb (dvd aren't 4.7gb that's a marketing trick).

So for $250 bucks you got yourself a dvd that can be used in anyone's dvd drive and is good for 100 years in the storage box.

Not to mention you have a DVD burner too =)

Re:Reliability

[gmack]

Yeah it's a great help if the odds of a drive failing is rare but you can't risk it.

The problem here is that thanks to a general lack of quality in the desktop ICE space from vendors like IBM and fujitsu who will continue to sell known faulty drives the odds of losing 2 drives at once are sadly not in your favor.

Re:Backup

[karnal]

Heck, try using tape sometime. Zip disks are expensive (and a little unreliable, the last time I used them anyways...)

I've got a DDS3 drive that was donated to me (ahem) and has worked perfectly since the installation. However, I almost balked at the current retail price of tapes. I believe Microcenter wants 10-12$ PER TAPE, of which, if you're storing MP3's, you only get about 11gig out of a tape. (The hardware compression is not good on decently compressed files, and actually ends up eating more space than the raw data would.....)

So, for 80 gigs (estimation), you need 8 tapes. Minimum 10$/tape, that is 80$. May as well buy another drive; let alone the speed of backup / restore and the tape change duties.

I've won 2 bids on ebay and now have 30+ tapes, brand new, for around 60$ total investment. Now I've got enough tapes to do 2 full backups of my server, and have some spares for incrementals and "oddball" machines. But sometimes, the time invested makes me wonder if I shouldn't just get a removable rack + a few 120gig drives........ and sell the tape drive....

Re:Who cares

[Tower]

Ah, but the IBM drives can speed throttle, so you can run at full speed while on AC power, and run at reduced speed on battery... The best of both worlds (aside from the heat issues).

Re:Backup

[addaon]

Where's that 100 years number from? I generally assume (based on experience) that CDs are good for 10-15 years in the box; I have no sense of the lifetime of DVDs, but I'd be surprised if it's that much higher. Never mind that $1 DVDs from ebay are almost certainly the cheapest and lowest quality possible; I'd be very reluctant to assume more than 5 years for such a disc. Any source?

Re:smaller form factors

[ottffssent]

Check out Toshiba's 1.8" hard drives. They're found (surprise) in Toshiba's ultra-portables, as well as the Apple iPod, and other devices.

While the reduction from 2.5" to 1.8" doesn't seem like much (about 25%), it's actually enormous in terms of platter area. A 2.5" diameter platter has almost 10 square inches of surface area, whereas a 1.8" diameter platter has just over half that. The situation becomes even more pronounced when you account for a drive motor in the center. That's why Tosh's drive tops out at 20G whereas IBM's talking about an 80G drive in the 2.5" form factor.

Re:Who cares

[Hadlock]

iiiiinteresting. so is this supported internally (the drive itself does this), or is it somthing the board has to support? it seems like most people who would end up buying this wouldn't have support for speed throttling, negating this feature. or can all laptop drives speed throttle?