Hitachi and Partners Develop New HDD Technology Providing 8-Fold Density Increase

[btarunr]

A consortium led by Hitachi, including Japan's New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO), a public-sector body that promotes research of energy-efficient technologies, National University Corporation Tokyo Institute of Technology, and Kyoto University, have developed a new hard drive data recording technology that promises to increase data density 8-fold.

The researchers have developed a new patterning technology for the magnetized bits that are laid on the platters, which are just 10 nm in size. This is made possible by using new materials, and making use of a self-arranged phenomenon of polymer materials. Its practical applications increases areal-density of disk platters to 3.9 Terabits per square inch, an 8-fold increase compared to the 500 Gigabits per square inch that's currently standard. This paves the way for 24 Terabyte (TB) hard drives in the very near future.



View at TechPowerUp Main Site

 

[filip007]

Great when?, i just want speed, durability and no noise.

 

[TheLaughingMan]

Holy shit Batman!

 

[LAN_deRf_HA]

So... 6 tb single platter drives? That'd be quite the sweet spot for size and perf.

 

[bear jesus]

If this leads to 24tb drives in the future then I'm sure this will help normal drives stick around for even longer, imagine the cost of a 24tb SSD

Right now I'm happy with 2tb drives but as i move onto storing more HD video i will love the ever increasing capacity for use as secondary storage, as far as i can see though SSD for primary is still the way forward.

Any idea if this will also increase sequential speed as well as capacity?

 

[inferKNOX]

Daaaayyyyy....mn!!!
I look forward to that! Bring on the new Samsung Spinpoint Fx (assuming they'll be allowed to employ the tech)!

 

[zAAm]

If this leads to 24tb drives in the future then I'm sure this will help normal drives stick around for even longer, imagine the cost of a 24tb SSD

Right now I'm happy with 2tb drives but as i move onto storing more HD video i will love the ever increasing capacity for use as secondary storage, as far as i can see though SSD for primary is still the way forward.

Any idea if this will also increase sequential speed as well as capacity?

If the physical size of the platters stay the same as well as the rotational speed, we could also see an 8-fold (probably less but still significant) increase in sequential performance yes. Latencies will stay roughly the same though unfortunately (given the same spindle speed), so I agree that SSD will be the best bet for system drives. I won't say no for a 24TB secondary drive though! My 2.5TB storage is not nearly enough...

 

[xaira]

anybody else think we should slow down, i mean come on, wasnt it just the other day we were astounded by the intro of 1tb, now 3tb, very near to 10tb yeh, but24 ::

 

[slyfox2151]

fuck no we should not slow down... if anything we should be at 100TB drives by now IMO!



the more the better.

 

[TAViX]

Good news. Regarding SSD, I will NEVER use an SSD to store backup files. Not if I want to have the files more than 3 years that is...

 

[bear jesus]

anybody else think we should slow down, i mean come on, wasnt it just the other day we were astounded by the intro of 1tb, now 3tb, very near to 10tb yeh, but24 ::

Even though it says very near future i would not expect anything like 24tb before 2012 if not later, this is newly developed hard drive tech that i would assume is a long way from mass production at this point and even then i would assume for it to start with smaller sizes of just a few tb.

Good news. Regarding SSD, I will NEVER use an SSD to store backup files. Not if I want to have the files more than 3 years that is...

I would hope right now no one intends to use SSD's for their long term storage, normal hard drives or other removable storage is the only logical option right now and even more so from a cost perspective with 2tb drives being so cheap.

fuck no we should not slow down... if anything we should be at 100GB drives by now IMO!



the more the better.

I assume you meant 100tb but i agree, i was so happy to see 100gb drives available back when i was using tens of gb and now I'm finding it easy to fill multiple tb, with future HD video that's well past 1080p hundreds of tb will become easy to fill.

 

[slyfox2151]

hehe yeah 100TB


i think we will be stuck at 1080p for many years... i cant see it incressing before 2016-2018 etleast .... even pc monitors havnt gone far past 1080p for a wile.

 

[bear jesus]

hehe yeah 100TB


i think we will be stuck at 1080p for many years... i cant see it incressing before 2016-2018 etleast .... even pc monitors havnt gone far past 1080p for a wile.

True it wont be for a while yet but the BBC has already used ultra high definition cameras with a res of 7680x4320... although it was for a gig by the charlatans and broadcast in japan so not exactly useful but it shows where we are heading and video at that kind of res will take up a crazy amount of storage space.

"At full resolution, those signals are transmitted at a staggering 24Gb/s"

"Uncompressed, a 20 minute broadcast would require roughly 4TB of storage"

 

[slyfox2151]

True it wont be for a while yet but the BBC has already used ultra high definition cameras with a res of 7680x4320... although it was for a gig by the charlatans and broadcast in japan so not exactly useful but it shows where we are heading and video at that kind of res will take up a crazy amount of storage space.

"At full resolution, those signals are transmitted at a staggering 24Gb/s"

"Uncompressed, a 20 minute broadcast would require roughly 4TB of storage"

now thats the sort of quality i want

 

[gumpty]

Nice one. I would like to see some high capacity 2.5" HDDs hit the market. It might once and for all kill off 3.5" drives. Imagine the space that could be saved, even in a high end tower case, by using 2.5" drives rather than 3.5".

 

[bear jesus]

now thats the sort of quality i want

same here, and monitors to go with it... i wonder if by the time they arrive gpu's will be able to run 3 of them to game at 23580x4320.

Really i can't wait for both ultra high storage amounts to go with ultra high definition but it will take a while

 

[Swamp Monster]

24 TB HDD sounds cool, but to me -making use of a self-arranged phenomenon of polymer materials- doesn't sound long lasting and sturdy. I hope I am wrong on this.

 

[inferKNOX]

Nice one. I would like to see some high capacity 2.5" HDDs hit the market. It might once and for all kill off 3.5" drives. Imagine the space that could be saved, even in a high end tower case, by using 2.5" drives rather than 3.5".

I had a similar argument with friends about making mini BDs the size of mini DVDs/CDs and using mini BDs for movies & mini DVDs for music, instead of DVDs and CDs respectively, then phasing out the larger discs. EVERYONE argued otherwise with me, that more capacity=better regardless of physical size & portability.:shadedshu

 

[Easo]

Just bring it on!

 

[Mussels]

anybody else think we should slow down, i mean come on, wasnt it just the other day we were astounded by the intro of 1tb, now 3tb, very near to 10tb yeh, but24 ::

hell no, i've got about 15TB of data and NEED MOAR.

 

[bear jesus]

hell no, i've got about 15TB of data and NEED MOAR.

showing off with your massive amount of data and storage I only have 7TB between all the computers in my house.

I would love a nice fast SSD as my boot drive then a pair of 24TB drives in raid 1 to store everything else but unlike some people (with more data than i have storage space in my house ) that would last me for a year or two

 

[pantherx12]

24 TB HDD sounds cool, but to me -making use of a self-arranged phenomenon of polymer materials- doesn't sound long lasting and sturdy. I hope I am wrong on this.

Why not? Ever heard of crystals ? Pretty damn tough and are self arranged materials

 

[Kaleid]

One can never have too much space and the additional density will increase the performance. So, bring it on!

 

[mechtech]

Hmmm 8 fold increase in density!! I wonder what kind of real world increase in speed it would gain? 3 fold maybe?

If so they could read/write around 300MB/s which would make ssd almost obsolete if not for the quick access/load times.

 

[bear jesus]

Hmmm 8 fold increase in density!! I wonder what kind of real world increase in speed it would gain? 3 fold maybe?

If so they could read/write around 300MB/s which would make ssd almost obsolete if not for the quick access/load times.

What about future ssd's though? I'm sure in the time it takes to get these hard drives there will be ssd's that saturate the sata 6gb/s connection and then again also pci-e ssd's that already get up to 1.4gb/s with insane iops so just think what they will be doing in the next year or two.