Toshiba Claims Hard-drive Breakthrough

[Psi*]

Toshiba's sample media is still in the prototype stage, but is built at a density equivalent to 2.5 terabits per square inch. Contrast that with Toshiba's current highest capacity drive today, which is based on existing technology and has a density of 541 gigabits per square inch or about one fifth that of the new technology.

So we are talking about 10 TB drives.

 

[Tharic-Nar]

I'm skeptical, they said they'll hit the market by 2013... will we have fixed the LBA block before then? Remember, solving it is one thing, implementing it is another, just look at how long it took 64-bit to become mainstream, then of course there is the previous 28bit to 48bit LBA fiasco a few years back (remember those 137GB drives?).

I wouldn't mind learning a bit more about the tech, since i have concerns over redundancy and speed, not to mention price....

 

[Kougar]

Any 64bit version of Windows (save perhaps XP 64) supports 64-bit LBA addressing, allowing >2TB partitions to be used. The BIOS itself prevents them from being used as a boot drive though... this may be the inflection point when EFI finally starts to gain inroads into displacing the old BIOS.

I can't test it myself to be sure, but I've read one way to work around the LBA limitation is to create multiple partitions 2TB or smaller in size on the drive. I don't know if this would allow the partition to become bootable, but other OS's that don't use a 64bit-LBA addressing should then work with the drive for data storage.

 

[madstork91]

I would, at this time, like to remind people of the fact that I have said HDD development is where it is at right now, and that prices for a 1TB drive reaching $100 soon isn't completely out of the question.

Thank you for your time.

 

[killem2]

I tired of the need to make these hard drives bigger. I want to see more invested into making SSD the main stream. I really want to try some out but I also want this space. I know its possible to make a large ssd drive, so damn it toshiba, get on it! (and intel, ocz, kingston, and so forth)

 

[Psi*]

My crystal ball says that HD access times will dramatically improve also. I do not have any inside info ...

 

[Tharic-Nar]

Only three ways I know of that could speed up access times on the mechanical side ... Multiple heads per platter (i think we've been crying out for them, like... forever), and due to the higher density of these new drives, make the platter smaller with a faster spinning spindle... which is basically what SCSI drives and WD Raptor range do, 2.5" platters in a 3.5" case with 10-15k spindles.

A fourth method might be to store the allocation table (not entirely sure what to call it) in flash memory, rather than on the platter, but you'd need about 2-4GB or more of flash memory - depending on the total size of the drive, but storing it in flash means that the drive doesn't need to keep accessing it on the platter for every file, reducing track swapping.... but from my limited understanding, the allocation table placement and such is handled by the file system and/or OS, rather than by the hard drive itself.