Nanomaterial May Be Future of Hard Drives 82
sciencehabit writes "Most magnets shrug off tiny temperature tweaks. But now physicists have created a new nanomaterial--an ultrathin 10-nanometer layer of nickel grafted onto a 100-nanometer-thick wafer of a substance called vanadium oxide--that dramatically changes how easily it flips its magnetic orientation when heated or cooled only slightly. The effect, never before seen in any material, could eventually lead to new types of computer memory."
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Yea it is not like our computer is filled with a bunch of tiny little things that are rated in nano-meters. It is not like engineers worry about how heat affects particular devices.
The idea of overclocking your PC to get faster speed is quite true. That said, it heats up your CPU more so if you don't find a way to regulate the heat you get more problems. For some reason those engineers who made those chips created them to run within a particular temperature variance.
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Re:Hard drives have no future. (Score:4, Insightful)
not in the sever room and they still have tape as well there.
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Yes they are going away.
Enterprise SSD's are here [anandtech.com]. Just a few years ago yes a mechanical disk was faster than an SSD for sequential writes and reads for most work and hell of a lot more reliable than an ssd. But that is not true anymore. Newer drives have 5 year warranties and up to 80 gig endurance a day for 5 years now!
Performance wise the newer Sans disk and Samsungs get up to +500 megs a second per drive! FYI a 4 raid with mechanical drives gets just 120 megs a second. A raid +5 can reach close to 2 TB
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b) Backups, backup, backups. Put a 2nd (or 3rd) magnetic HD on the system and use one (or both) as a target for an Acronis True Image Home backup each month. It's dirt-cheap at $30 (or the 3-pack for $75) and gives you a way to restore the customer's machine to a previous point in time. Even if the SSD dies
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Those are due to crappy 1st generation sandforce controllers. Problem doesn't happen anymore with the real drives and not munchkins. Did you see the ratings I posted? MaximumPC has an article on Sandisk and others OEM reliability from last month with newer technology (discussed on Slashdot) that have higher endurance. The pro enterprise editions and extreme editions have freaking 80 gigs a day for 5 years warranty.
More reliable than a mechanical as my Seagate drives keep dying after a few years.
They are now
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I have hundreds of mechanical drives in service. Only about 1/3 of them give any meaningful warnings - and many of them tell outright fibs about bad sectors. SMART is only useful if makers don't goose it - and most have goosed it to keep returns down.
BTW, Did you notice most HDD warranties are down to 12 months? There's a reason for that.
RAID saves against sudden drive death (most consumers will ignore signals of impending doom). Backups save against everything else.
If you want the best of all worlds, build
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> Witness how quickly SSD are replacing conventional hard drives.
So... not very quickly? SSDs are way better, yes. They're also way tinier and way more expensive. Maybe eventually SSD will replace mechanical storage, but not until you can go to a store and get a 3TB external for like a hundred bucks. Yeah, that'll probably happen sometime, but I'm not seeing any of those right now.
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Price is not the issue durability is.
SSDs are good for holding stuff that can easily be replaced such as executables and shared libraries, but when it comes to data I expect unchanged in 5 years time-- the good old hard drive is better.
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The newest Sansdisk ssd (for mid and not just high end) has OEM reliability with a 5 year warranty with 80 gigs of writing for 5 years or 4 TB of data writes.
The matches if not exceeds a regular drive. With Raid it is easy to replace a dead disk too.
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You're confusing write endurance with storage endurance.
One important spec most people don't look at is how long the content of a SSD will stay intact if the device is put on a shelf and left there a while.
I have high confidence that HDDs will still be readable in 2-3 years. Most SSDs are only waranteed to hold their data for 12 months.
The smaller the SSD cells get, the worse the storage endurance problem is becoming (and smaller cells = slower write speeds too, which brings in a bunch of interesting workar
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You know nothing!
You especially know nothing about Crypto. You have lots of bit brains that won't abandon their beloved spinning platters because they are wanting an SSD. Crypto doesn't work the same way on said SSD. Simply spinning platters are where they exist and where they will stay. Don't expect your hard disk drives to disappear from the world entirely. Also, 4 TB SSDs are a bit hard to maintain. I have 9 at home. I don't expect to ditch them for SSDs any time soon.
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Absurd non sequitur, AC. It doesn't matter a whit what the size of the SSDs is; what matters is the total cost of storage device plus driving hardware per GB.
1) And when will that be when 1TB SSDs reach 1/3 the cost of 3TB HDs, eh? They are currently over 3X, and it has taken
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Does the average user need 3TB?
Most need about 32 gigs of data as that is what they have on their phones which have replaced the computer. Of course Windows SXS likes 70 gigs for .dll files.
A 240 gig SSD is plenty and they are getting cheaper and chaper and faster and faster rapidly fast. At the end of the year at this rate we will see 1 TB ssds in the $300 range!
For a server yes they are worth the money and themselves in raid and the cost is neglibable compared to the I/o improvement.
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I think it just adds another layer to the storage tree: near/quick memory all the way to far/slow memory. You have your various layers of cache on the processor, RAM, RAM disks, SSDs, Hard drives, Tape drives, etc.
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SSD has gotten less expensive, but it still is about $75/$1.00 a gig, well more than a comparable spinny platter.
There is also the issue of data retention. This is an unknown with SSD. With a hard disk, the magnetic domains tend to stay magnetized in the patterns they were placed in. SSD, once those electronics are out of the gate, there is no recovery of data, period.
I think eventually something will replace HDDs, such as holographic storage, but for now, HDDs will tend to be a mainstay for tier 2, and
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Personally, for some things just a bit of redundancy (Raid-Z2 + hot spares) is enough... other things, I have in as many places as I can get them.
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SSD has gotten less expensive, but it still is about $75/$1.00 a gig, well more than a comparable spinny platter.
More like $0.50 per gig. Prices have been dropping fast and cheap SSDs are finally on the rise. You can now get an 240GB SSD for $100 which is not bad considering this was absolutely impossible one year ago.
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Prices have been dropping fast and cheap SSDs are finally on the rise. You can now get an 240GB SSD for $100
and I can buy a 3 TB spinning rust drive for the same price.
Thats 12 times the storage per dollar. As a regular joe sixpack consumer which am i going to pick?
As a computer person I will go with both, a smallish SSD for the OS and a RAID of array of 2-4 3TB Spinning Rust Drives for Storage.
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> > Prices have been dropping fast and cheap SSDs are finally on the rise. You can now get an 240GB SSD for $100
> and I can buy a 3 TB spinning rust drive for the same price.
Yes, for a cheap, slow spinner with a short warranty.
Try pricing up a 15-20rpm SAS drive and you'll find they're virtually the same price as SSD - result is that over the last 12 months SAS SSD drives have effectively made high speed spinners as dead as The old Quantum Bigfoot.
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...please consider the problems of secure data erasure, which HDDs rule becuase you can scramble them with electromagnets, or hammers, or even fire. Unless they produce electronics where the chips themselves are destroyed on command, then SSDs cannot compete, the traces left in the chips can be recovered.
For security purposes if their are chips left after you burn something then you aren't using enough thermite.
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Before I ever entered I.T. professionally 20 years ago, people had been claiming the impending death of magnetic tape for more than a decade. at least, yet it is still with us today. Sure, the round-wheel tape is more-or-less gone, but tape is still going strong.
Similarly, SSD's are not going to completely replace mechanical storage any time soon,
Oh great (Score:4, Funny)
Something else that won't work properly in Canadian weather.
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They make gloves that work with touchscreens now. They're only in the thinner gloves, though, not the giant arctic gloves.
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I haven't lived there, but I've been there several times. Thin gloves are perfectly adequate in Vancouver even during the winter. Not all of Canada is like Yellowknife.
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Hell, back around 1990 or so, I was working on a touchscreen interface for the Army, and we had to test with arctic gloves.
For POC on the algorithms, I brought in some ski gloves, then we used the real arctic gloves for QA.
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Yeah, Canada is about 100C too warm.
Lasers? (Score:1)
So a laser and a bigass heatsink then?
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They still are ways off from finding something that works at room temperature...
"Vanadium oxideâ(TM)s atoms take on one arrangement above negative 88 deg. C and another below negative 123 deg. C. Between the two temperatures, however, the material contains blocks with both arrangements. That mixed structure makes it harder for the overlying nickelâ(TM)s grains to flip en masse"
Call it what it is. (Score:5, Insightful)
> a 100-nanometer-thick wafer of a substance called vanadium oxide
Why not say " a 100-nanometer-thick wafer of vanadium oxide" because a substance is called vanadium oxide when it is vanadium oxide.
They kinda should (Score:2)
It's not an obscure compound, and you can tell exactly what it is from the name.
First you have vanadium - which is right between titanium and chromium on the periodic table; it's a moderately common metal (somewhat more expensive than copper), used mostly as a steel additive. Even if you've never heard of vanadium, the name pretty much tells you that it's an element (which forms oxides, apparently).
Second, you have oxygen, which... yeah. ;)
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I got my chemical education in college.
I still see the trails sometimes...
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> a 100-nanometer-thick wafer of a substance called vanadium oxide
Why not say " a 100-nanometer-thick wafer of vanadium oxide" because a substance is called vanadium oxide when it is vanadium oxide.
Because the submitter doesn't know any better and because the editors . . . well they are editors in name only
substances (Score:1)
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we like our substances, dammit
I'm a big fan of Barium Cobalt Nitride.........
Everyone loves BaCoN.
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To be fair, some people might not be aware that substances are often made up of substance.
Future of hard drives is oblivion (Score:1)
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Ten times or more is not "a bit", twit.
Wrong as a blanket statement. For some specific usages, maybe. For a lot of others, no. Just no. Not worth 10X more $; often not worth ANY more $.
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Wake me up when SSDs are cheaper per gigabyte than hard drives. Last I checked, they were more expensive by at least an order of magnitude.
You can get a 240 gig SSD for $170.
Not everyone needs a 3TB drive.
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I'm a little surprised we haven't seen 5.25" drives already for servers, so I can only assume there's a good reason for that. Perhaps such large platters bend too much at the edges, making alignment problemtic, or maybe they can't be spun as fast reliably, making average access times poor (good on the fast-moving outer sectors, but slow on the inner sectors). The computer industry moved wholesale to 3.5" drives long ago, and there was only one brief fling with 5.25" at the very end: Quantum's "Bigfoot" dr
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Yes, I've heard this too. It does seem odd, so I wonder what the reason is; you'd think you'd want discs to be bigger, not smaller, as you get much more surface area on a larger platter, plus at a given speed, the outer edges are moving much faster than on a smaller platter, so the transfer speeds for that data will be very high. I must be missing something. Servers wouldn't be going to a smaller form factor just for the heck of it.
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This is fairly application dependent - especially since most enterprise class hard drives have some sort of caching... ...and that's without factoring in their controllers.
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Yep, it normaly varies from a pretty big problem to a huge one, depending on the application.
But since it's application dependent, manufacturers don't even need to cite times at their specification. That's maddening.
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Power and heat. In a large server farm, those are king.
2.5s are less power hungry and generate less heat than 3.5s or 5.25s.
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Power and heat. In a large server farm, those are king.
2.5s are less power hungry and generate less heat than 3.5s or 5.25s.
Plus 2.5's are getting large and fast enough to compete with 3.5's.
I bought a 10K RPM WD Raptor (AKA a VelociHeater) years ago before SSD's were mainstream and it was essentially a 2.5" drive in a 3.5" heat sink. With SSD's taking over from 15K enterprise drives the demand for spinning disks is more for capacity than speed, so slower drives that generate less heat and use less power.
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Seems that 5.25" drives would win there too. Sure, a 5.25" drive will use more power than a 2.5", but with today's data densities a 5.25" drive would be massive compared to a 2.5" drive and you would need a lot less of them.
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You can get lower access latency on a 2.5" drive because the heads are smaller and don't need to travel as far.
They also produce less heat and require less power for the same reason.
I don't think so. (Score:1)
What would be the edge over our current SSD?
From what I have understood from the summary (I didn't RTFA) the only application that I can think of is a thinner thermal fuse. One layer of this sandwiched between two permanent magnets. When this material detects heat, magnetic orientation switches which will repel both sides opening the circuit. When it goes back, it will attract both sides thus closing the circuit. Advantage is there are no mechanical springs.
May = probably wont (Score:2)
That technology doesn't sound very promising.
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A more accurate headline would have been "Will this nanomaterial be the future of hard drives?". Then I would have been able to apply Betteridge's law and avoid wasting time reading the article.
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Will it be the future of tape? They're not even 1/100th the density of disks yet.