Hitachi Aims for 10TB Drives With Laser Heat

[Marcus Yam]

You know, I have one simple request. And that is to have hard drives with frickin' laser beams attached to their heads!

Hitachi Aims for 10TB Drives With Laser Heat : Read more

 

[MadGoat1979]

To heat it? Interesting. What would this do for Storage / Watt I wonder? Are hard drives becoming the "Tape Drives" of the past?

Interesting indeed....

 

[hakesterman]

Heat Kills almost everything, hard to believe that it won't damage data after multiple writes to the
drive. I'm not going down that road, SSD are the future and that's the road i'm traveling. I'm just
saying!

 

[botabota]

Awesome... more room for pirated movies, software and... porn

 

[nforce4max]

Now this is scary for those who working in data recovery and even modern drives are pain enough to salvage as it is but this takes that to a new level.

 

[alextheawesome]

You know, I have one simple request. And that is to have hard drives with frickin' laser beams attached to their heads!



hahahaha. austin powers.

 

[xaira]

Step 1: Get Hard-drives
Step 2: Attach lasers to Hard-drives
Step 3:--------
Step 4: Profit

Sounds like a plan to me...

 

[derek2006]

Madgoat the beam is going to be 20nm to hit up a very small area. You probably will not notice an increased power draw, think about it man.

Hakesterman, you need to realize they are manufacturing it to work with heat, again just think about it.

 

[wintermint]

I'm happy that technology is advancing but I don't like how it will leave a huge dent in our wallet (

 

[Silicon Jesus]

Lasers are the future! Erm... Or is it the past?

 

[groveborn]

[citation][nom]derek2006[/nom]Madgoat the beam is going to be 20nm to hit up a very small area. You probably will not notice an increased power draw, think about it man. Hakesterman, you need to realize they are manufacturing it to work with heat, again just think about it.[/citation]

... 20nm is essentially the color of the beam. It has nothing to do with power consumption at all. It means it's blue, nearly ultraviolet. The power comes in terms of wattage. A pen laser is typically rated at 5mw, that's a decently bright beam, but not at all hot. If you increase it to 50nm, it can hurt within a few inches. 100mw, and it'll light stuff on fire, given enough time. To heat the disk at 10,000 rpm, it'll have to be very powerful, depending on how hot it needs to get. I'm thinking in the 250mw to 400mw range, though I'm no expert. Maybe it'll heat it up through several rounds of spin or something... I dunno. Either way, that's a significant draw on a battery. You get a good 10-20 minutes out of two AA batteries with the 5 mw lasers... do the math if you care to.

 

[derek2006]

It is still a very small area to heat up

 

[Guest]

The shortest visible wavelenght is 380nm. 20nm is very much shorter than that. Is has to be that short to enable focusing the beam in a very small point.

 

[rags_20]

I'm seeing high rates of failure.

 

[elpresidente2075]

groveborn,

I would imagine that the amount of heat needed will be very very small, given the size of the heated area. Further, I doubt it will need to get anything near phase change, probably just enough to make the area vibrate or warp very slightly. With your examples you are heating things that are relatively very large. The lasers in question here will be heating things that are utterly microscopic, thus reducing the required power significantly, possibly into the micro- or nanowatt range.

 

[Guest]

4 of those in RAID =40 TB enough to run windows 8 within a few years lol

 

[bison88]

I just got a hard on bigger than the Dubai towers.

 

[Hupiscratch]

I think Tom's already made an article about future hard disk drive technology. You should link it, Marcus.

 

[bison88]

I agree with the link. I have been interested to see where and when the hard drive market picks up again and starts taking TB upgrades. Last article I read mentioned something about 3-4TB this year early next.

 

[LATTEH]

WOW i can't wait for this!

 

[Guest]

Sound like the magneto optical technology used in UMDs

 

[koga73]

they heat the plates to expand surface area im guessing?

 

[freiheitner]

I'm thinking back to such lackluster laser-based technologies as LS-120 floppy drives, HD-DVD and Blu-Ray (yeah, they're faster than DVD or CD but not nearly fast enough to be used as a hard drive). I can't imagine this process would be fast enough to simultaneously outpace SSDs for capacity and maintain the high performance expected of a hard drive. SSDs with half or quarter the capacity might start to tip the scales due to significantly faster seeks and dropping prices.

 

[cheepstuff]

[citation][nom]groveborn[/nom]... 20nm is essentially the color of the beam. It has nothing to do with power consumption at all. It means it's blue, nearly ultraviolet. The power comes in terms of wattage. A pen laser is typically rated at 5mw, that's a decently bright beam, but not at all hot. If you increase it to 50nm, it can hurt within a few inches. 100mw, and it'll light stuff on fire, given enough time. To heat the disk at 10,000 rpm, it'll have to be very powerful, depending on how hot it needs to get. I'm thinking in the 250mw to 400mw range, though I'm no expert. Maybe it'll heat it up through several rounds of spin or something... I dunno. Either way, that's a significant draw on a battery. You get a good 10-20 minutes out of two AA batteries with the 5 mw lasers... do the math if you care to.[/citation]

true, the laser is only meant to warp a microscopic section of metal. the power consumed is small. even writing huge files to the disk will only heat a thin ribbon for a moment, that is until the disk rotates one or two cycles and the ambient air cools it down once again.

[citation][nom]groveborn[/nom]... 20nm is essentially the color of the beam. It has nothing to do with power consumption at all.[/citation]

20nm is essentially the wave length of the beam. the color is just what our retinas' detect at that wave length. the amount of energy it would take to heat something so small is negligable compared to the heat given off by such things as the disk motor ect.

 

[h2o_skiman]

Heating allows materials to be more easily magnetized. The heads on disk drives today can read bits that are much smaller than can be created currently. By heating a very small area, the write head uses a fraction of the energy to write a bit. Only the area heated picks up the magnetizing field, not the entire area exposed to field in today's drives. The laser controls the areal density, not the size of recording head.