New HDD Tech

[Jammrock]

If this article is true, it may just kill hybrid HDDs and many flash applications.

Basically, they have an idea to make "floppy" HDD platters 22-25 micron thin from stainless steel or titanium, making it easy to spin (requiring a smaller motor so less power, less cost), adds capacity (12-15 platter per drive versus 4-5), faster (new head technology), cheaper (doesn't need to be made in clean room and other manufacturing changes) and is "drop proof" without any extra circuitry (the material flexes with the change in air pressure without losing the data so it's nearly impossible for the head to ever touch the platter). An interesting read. The first of these are supposed to come out in 2007

http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2006/pulpit_20061026_001143.html

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Since disk storage is responsible for consuming 30 percent of the energy in your PC and up to 50 percent of the energy in a data center, it seemed to me that this would be a good area to look for improvements. Add to this the problem that in this world of YouTube and Sarbanes-Oxley no data center has enough storage, it becomes clear that we need disk drives that hold more, cost less, and use less energy.

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For a data center operator, simply swapping disk drives could increase storage by three times while decreasing total energy consumption by a third. This is a huge attraction for big businesses and big hosting companies, not just because it lowers their electric bills but because it may mean they can avoid building more data centers entirely.

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The technology in question replaces the aluminum or glass platter in your hard disk drive with a "platter" made from stainless steel or titanium foil that is 22 microns or 25 microns thick, respectively. The materials cost more but we use so much less of it (the disk is so incredibly thin) that the total material cost is substantially less. This "floppy" material has the same kind of magnetic coatings used on standard disk drives and our drives live on the same technology growth curve as those others. The way we obtain greater storage density is simply by putting more platters in a drive (say 12-15 instead of 4-5 in an enterprise 3.5-inch drive) because they are much thinner and can be stacked closer together. The only parts of the drive that are significantly different are the platters and the heads and the heads vary only in having an extra slot. There is no rocket science here, but what science there is is patented.

The advantage of our drives goes beyond enterprise applications. We are able to build cheaper drives, for example, because our platters cost less to make and the nature of our flying heads is such that dust is sucked away from the head-disk interface, meaning the drives do not have to be assembled in a clean room. Also, where current platters are individually polished then sputtered, our metal foil can be polished and sputtered in giant rolls then die cut as needed, keeping costs down and manufacturing flexibility up.

Because of the dramatically smaller rotating mass, our drives can use smaller spindle motors that cost less, weigh less, and use less energy. Our 3.5-inch drives can use the spindle motor from a 1-inch drive. For super-high-end applications we can make 30,000-RPM drives that will appeal to the Oracle and DB2 crowd. Our PC drives will cost less and use one quarter the power.

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In an iPod, for example, our 60-gig drive would be the same size as the iPod’s 30-gig drive, but ours wouldn't need head-parking or "uh-oh I'm falling" circuitry, so it would be cheaper to build. And while that 30-gig drive takes five seconds to spin up for each gulp of music, our 60-gig drive spins up in 0.4 seconds. Map the area under that power consumption curve and you'll see that battery life can be extended dramatically or smaller and cheaper batteries can be substituted.

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Our metal foil drive costs less, not more, and spins up so quickly that data can be read from disk as fast or faster than it can be read from flash. Who needs a hybrid disk drive?

Who needs flash in general as a mass storage technology? Our 10-gigabyte 0.85-inch drive can spin up, read or write data, then shut down again, all in less time than it takes to perform the same task using flash while being just as resistant to shock damage and more resistant to heat. That 10-gig drive will cost $24 compared to $240 for 10 gigs of flash, so we expect that our technology will be used for any application requiring more than 2-gigs of storage. The obvious market here is mobile phones, which will become media storage devices.
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[ZokesPro]

Hmm, thinner platters, fast spin up, higher rpm, reduced enrgy consumption, lower production costs, faster transfer rates yet not available. I guess we'll still be seeing HDD's for quite a while still, if the article is true.

[Jammrock]

I guess we'll still be seeing HDD's for quite a while still, if the article is true.

They are still HDDs, just different platter and read/write head tech. According to the author, who is also an investor in the tech (and makes a big note of it in the article), they should start coming out next year. We'll see though.

I thought of this after I posted. If you can fit 12-15 platters in a 3.5" HDD using this tech, and current densities are at ~200 GB per platter, that's 2.4-3 TB for a single HDD

I sure hope this tech pans out.

[Nowhere]

Jamm, I wouldn't be so sure they are still hard disk drives

[Kooldino]

So if this is so great and obvious, why hasn't this already been done in the past?

[TransformX]

I Still vote for a big pack of a few tens of 2GB microSD cards.

[spadnos]

So if this is so great and obvious, why hasn't this already been done in the past?

Sometimes, new manufacturing techniques are invented, which make new products economically viable.

Making a 20-25 micron thick piece of stainless steel (and being able to measure whether you've done it correctly) was probably not possible for a consumer product until the last few years.

- Steve