Making a hard drive like the cd dvd device form factor?

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okppko

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Nov 6, 2009
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This is out of the box thinking. I want to know what the difficulties are in manufacturing, what I am asking about.
The cd dvd device has the electronics one time, and you only swap the media. Max capacity is about 9gb, dvd dl. The media is the cheap part. About a hard drive you get the whole package every time. The electronics and the media in a closed config. The media being the cheap part. Why can't a hard drive be made like a cd dvd device? Where the electronics is in the computer. And you swap the hard drive disc only. The hard drive disc could be embedded in a cartridge. That way, data storage costs should lower significantly. Thank you.
 
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kenrivers
The closest thing I can think of is hot swappable bays that you can add to a desktop that would enable you swap out hard drives. The same thing, as previously mentioned by popatim, is to use a drive doc.
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manofchalk

manofchalk

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Main reason is that the tolerances within an Optical and Hard Disk drive are on entirely different scales.

With an optical disc, the clearance between the reader and disc itself is 1-2mm, with a HDD your talking distances smaller than fraction of a hairs width. As well as the fact that disk spins far faster than a disc will, this actually causes gale force wind speeds inside the HDD. The assembly of the HDD enclosure needs to be exact, if you disassemble a HDD and then re-assemble it without properly measuring the torque used to put the screws back in you get a dead drive.

Quite simply, the CD Optical drive is exactly what your saying, its the closest we can get to a normal HDD but with the ability to change the storage medium withe ease.
 
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okppko

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Thank you. Could a cartridge, like I described, reach 1tb, that would be a big improvement. Maybe decreasing ram prices will be the solution. Then a device with the electronics accepting ram cartridges could be the answer.
 
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popatim

popatim

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The hard drive is about as cartidge'd as its going to get. Thats pretty much what they did when they created Ide. They removed all the controlling stuff they could to the motherbd and left everything they needed to run the drive on the drive. Each drive motor and heads have different electrical characteristics so you cant remove their controller. Each spindle also has slightly different characteristics (density, platters, heads, track, sectors...) so you cant separate the heads and spin motors. Then the spindle and controllers need a little smarts, hence firmware and processor, so these stay with the unit. then if you want best speed out of a drive you need to add some cache to it and that will necessitate more smarts to control it. And then comes even more smarts needed to manage bad sectors. this has to stay on the drive too in case you move it around.

So you see they already have this invention your thinking of; its called a drive dock.
 
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