Fabrication Trick Offers Fivefold Leap in Hard-Disk Capacity

MIT Technology Review ^ | November 16, 2012 | By Tom Simonite

[Red Badger]

Fine lines: Polymer molecules assembled themselves into the regular pattern of 10 nanometer-wide corridors in the larger of these two microscope images, thanks to the use of a new coating that helps the molecules align correctly. The smaller image shows that without the coating, the polymers don’t form organized structure

[Red Badger]

Tech Ping!......

[rarestia]

I’m surprised the industry is still so focused on spinning disk for storage, but considering the longevity and rewriteability of spinning disk vs. SSD, I suppose there’s room for improvement.

Could 10TiB - 15 TiB spinning disk be in our future?

[Red Badger]

At “one terabit of information (1,024 gigabytes) per square inch” they will be in your iPod.......

[ShadowAce]

[Army Air Corps]

That is a heck of a lot of data capacity.

[Robe]

Right !! This is the story of my life.... Just when my first 1TB drive is making it’s way from Tiger Direct to my house in the back of a UPS truck...sigh

[Red Badger]

That depends on how many pr0n videos you want to store........

[Red Badger]

My first HDD was a 40MB Seagate. I paid over $300, mail order. I wondered how in heck I could EVER fill such a thing..........

[Army Air Corps]

It should be enough capacity for at least one Jerry Garcia guitar solo.

[I cannot think of a name]

“My first HDD was a 40MB Seagate”

First one I ever bought was for our IBM AT (bigger brother to the PC). A huge metal can that held an astounding 5 megs, and only cost $1800+. Of course at the time, money wasn’t a concern because after all, nobody could ever fill up 5 megs. And compared to those big 8” floppies that only held 180k, we were now in the big leagues!

[MrB]

So, do they actually mean “5 FOLD” (32 times),
or do they mean “5 times”?

[Robe]

My first HDD was a 40MB Seagate. I paid over $300

I have a file drawer full of those,I'll let 'em go cheap (8^)

[Dr. Sivana]

I have a file drawer full of those,I'll let 'em go cheap (8^)

Before you clearance them, do note that some circuit boards of that vintage used real gold (especially on mother boards). At the very least the old 5 1/4" spinners tend to have REALLY COOL magnets inside.

[FunkyZero]

I wish they would just let it die and force the move to solid state so the price would drop to reasonable levels. Problem with mechanical, multi-TB drives is that you need to use some sort of RAID method and a second backup due to the possible loss of huge amounts of data when even a single unit fails. It’s not like the old days, the failure rate on this garbage is high... I’d say 30% after 2 yrs of service. It’s gotten so bad, I mirror all my work on hot-pluggable docks and rotate them in and out of the safe deposit box.

[RedMDer]

[Red Badger]

5X..........

[frithguild]

My first HDD was a 40MB Seagate

Mine was great until I loaded Windows 3.0

[Red Badger]

Mine was great until I loaded Windows 3.0
Mine was great until I loaded Windows 3.1
Mine was great until I loaded Windows 95
Mine was great until I loaded Windows 98
Mine was great until I loaded Windows 98SE
Mine was great until I loaded Windows ME
Mine was great until I loaded Windows NT
Mine was great until I loaded Windows 2000
Mine was great until I loaded Windows XP
Mine was great until I loaded Windows Vista
Mine was great until I loaded Windows..........

[kevkrom]

iDevices won’t use platter disks of any form due to weight, shock, and power issues.

These are more likely to be used in large data centers where SSD is impractical and RAID arrays are par for the course to handle failed drives.