wow finally something better then SSD, i hate ssd.

If this is atleast the same price as SSD , well bye bye ssd.

Yeah, but can it store Crysis?

i call the bullshit card.

this information sounds like its being pulled from someone's ass, and if this does go through anytime before ssd's manage to take over the market with insane GB read/write speeds, i doubt it'll last too long.

and besides Hard Rectangular Drive (HRD) sounds a bit generic. Solid State Drive sounds the way of the foooooturee!!!

This is new news? I seen these drives around when I had my flux capacitor working..

What ever happened to holographic memory cubes?

What "typical" SSD uses 8W of power? My 64GB Samsung SLC draws 1W at load and a mere 0.3W at idle. The more consumer-centric, "typical", SSDs max out at around 2W at load. So...where is this silly number coming from?

I also call shenanigans. Apparently the HRD needs 4 watts, half of what an SSD needs. What kind of mainstream SSD consumes 8 watts? Eventually, an HRD will speed along at 500 MB/s. By the time this happens, SSDs will have saturated the SATA 6.0Gbps link.

The only way this thing ever makes it to market is if it can offer MTBF's in the 100-million-hour range, and i seriously doubt that is possible given the mechanical nature of the middle medium in motion.

This would be a great idea if there were no such thing as a solid-state disk.

wow, they couldn't even say the obligatory 3 to 5 years, not a good sign

The concept of this drive is "good", but its timing is BAD. If it came out about 10 years ago, it would be amazing. But this HRD wouldn't hit the market for 3~5 years, at best considering its at the prototype stage.

In 3 years, 512GB SSDs should be well under $100 if the capacity and price scales the same as Flash drives. Currently, the 64GB drive is $150~225. 128GB are $225~350. And then theres SATA3 to allow even faster drive.

The grand-daddy SSD? The PCIe Drives which can transfer about 1500mb a second, these start at about $1500+ Imagine having such a drive for under $500, Windows7 (or 8) will boot in about 5 seconds on a bad day.

SSDs can already do that, just look at the ioDrive. Eventually, they'll be consumer products.

the ioDrive is an SSD on steroids and btw that costs like what? 15000$ ? i forgot anyway something no1 will buy....

theres always something better but its price is outrageous. You can get a 100$ CPU Beat a 500$ CPU with the liquid cooling and stuff but no1 wants that cause its outrageous expensive. io is crap

oh and btw that ioDrive cant boot Windows.

If this si real , and has a 5 year warranty , and costs between that of the SSD's and HDD' I'll buy it.

BTW here is where they got the whole SSD's use up twice as much power thing.

http://www.dataslide.com/green.html

are lubricated and housed within in a standard 3.5-inch drive casing.

Proof read much Kevin? I love how the housing lubricates the drive!

I'll be more excited once they have a trial out in real production. There has been too many "Memory of the future" devices around for me to look forward to this one.

Of course something like this would come from Britain. Cool concept with a practical implication of 0 >.>

Think logically much? What Kevin has put makes perfect sense.

You missed the whole point of my post.

This is a completely new technology, how much do you think it will cost starting out? SSDs can already do better than this technology claims it will be able to do Eventually (And when is that? 3 years? 5 years? 10 years?).

With SSD prices and dropping and capacities rising, what do you think the state of the SSD market will be when this technology is actually marketable?



Jesus Christ

Your lack of comprehension of English is only trumped by your lack of comprehension of the subject at hand.

There are still people that buy that $500 processor, some for the guarantee that it clocks that high (or for the guarantee of a specific stepping), some for the warranty while attaining higher clocks (such as businesses), and some out of ignorance and abundance of monetary wealth.

And that doesn't even apply to hard drives. You can't overclock a Hard Drive, and SSDs offer the best performance, there is no other commercially available technology that provides better performance to the consumer. This article doesn't take price into account, and if it were a cheaper technology I'm sure Tom's would have mentioned that.

I doubt SSD's will ever be able to take over the market, there is always a cap to how good a certain technology will do.

The introduction of multiple processing cores anyone?While not the best example it shows that up is the only way technology can go.

If you cant' see anything similiar in the way the HRD is set up than you should review your knowledge of SSD's and HDD's.

What if they make a drive like this with 32 platters and 64 reading read/write layers? Considering it's all silicon based and no mechanical issues (like inertia force, which requires the current spinning platters to be thick so they don't break), it would theoretically be possible.

Also, because of non-issue with the physics forces that currently affect harddisks, they might make these things BIG, not just 3.5", and it will have huge capacity.

Also, with more advanced electronics thousands of "heads" could read and write simultaneously.

The technology has potential, we might reach speeds of tenths of gigabytes per second in a short time...
There's only so much parallel memory chips a SSD can have...

Good post wavetrex, I agree. This is the baby, the first. I dont recall the first described SSD and its potential, but Im sure people are expecting more than first concept.
This could flush out the SSD if designed to potential

this will never take off.
as though, it was designed from the concept to allow the use of multiple heads compared to the ordinary HDD that uses one head per platter. the idea is pretty shaky due to cost and reliability issues.
we don't need speed and large capacity at the same time from a single device since SSDs and HDDs complement each other already.

So there will be for need in such thing as RAM in the future, because the superior storage drives will be fast enough to operate data transfer directly to CPU cache. The other way is to expand RAM size to terabytes and use is as data storage (like i-Ram or ram-drive) but this will only improve the system performance. The need for external data storage drives will always remain and that can be any type of storage: SSD, HDD, HRD, USB flash drive. My only requirements for this drives is decent speed, low price and long life. I see no reason to discuss something we are not sure about.

sorry .. will be no need..

Someone fronting all the money for dev is sure about this. Its like saying "SSD's, why discus this?" before they came out.

I didn't say: "SSD's, why discus this?" before they came out.. or something like that, I just suggest you do not make such a statement like "HDR is total crap", "HDR will never take off", please tell us some facts not just your opinion in 4-5 words
sorry for bad english

Like the other guy said: 8w for an SSD? or even 12w for a HDD? (maybe a SAS on a streaming write...)
But is that 4w constant??? It better be able to drop down to .1w in idle or its trash. Sounds like its expensive to make anyway, with 64 r/w heads

oh, and if its the media that moves instead of the heads then the media can only take up 1/4 to 1/2 of the internal lateral area. It won't make for very dense storage... especially since there will be two layers of glass per layer of media.
and how fragile will that drive be? Hopefully heat won't distort the glass or cause it to shatter... maybe they should use Pyrex HAHA but still... I would dare risk dropping one...

Wow, a British contribution to science/engineering. I thought the only British contribution to the world is creative financial engineering.

This almost sounds like fairly land. So if they have 64 read/write heads right now and want millions in this same device later... let's say they can do it, what's stopping them from having a billion? Or just assign a head to each sector of the platter and not even require moving parts. The controller stores a map of the sectors anyway right? This is required to know how to move the head to extract stored data.

What are capacities? Like SSDs or HDs or more?

What would prices be? Like SSDs or HDs or more?

No word on a street date, this could be a few months until the first models or most likely, minimum of two years -_-

Well I was planning on getting two SSDs in October when Windows 7 releases so I don't think I'll be seeing this on the shelf too. Shame.