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Technology

10+ Gig Removables? 46

Posted by CmdrTaco from the wouldn't-it-be-nice dept.
swegerm writes "Well, if you think you're impressed with the nano magnetics at Cornell - which is years off - then you'll be even more impressed with the technology that is here now called "Near Field Recording". The company TeraStor has developed storage technology that starts at 10 Gig removable on a 5.25 single sided platter for $700-800 dollars. This will be similar to a CD or Zip drive. The starting areal density is 10 Giga bits/sq. inch and approach by the year 2001, 100 Giga bits/sq. inch. The theoretical maximum is 100,000 Giga bits/sq. inch. It is based on a combination of optics and magnetic media with the key solution being in the read/write head. It's supposed to even exceed GMR technology from IBM. "
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10+ Gig Removables? More

10+ Gig Removables?

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  • Big deal (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    It's all about timing. If it were introduced today, that would be pretty impressive. A year from now, no big deal. Two years from now, nobody'll care.

    Castlewood Systems' ORB drive (2GB removable) is another product that could've knocked 'em dead if it had made it to market when the manufacturer said it would (1997). Today, nobody gives a flying fuck about a proprietary 2GB removable format - DVD-RAM is here now and it's an open standard.
  • Doubt they're coming back...I believe Iomega bought the rights to the technology :(.

    (Owner of a p-port SyQuest SparQ talking here)

  • The only tunneling-like part was when they were discussing "recent" discoveries by Maxwell. Check that, attributed to Maxwell. The marketese was so thick I couldn't slice through to the physics, but it looks like plain ol' electromagnetic fields. No tunneling, no nuttin'. And doesn't even look like radiation, so it's really pre-Maxwell technology.
  • The Castlewood Orb drive is a 2.2G removable, $199 for IDE and SCSI interface, $30 per cart. It kinda works with Linux (see www.tatoosh.com/linuxorb [tatoosh.com]), I've had mixed success with mine so far.

    Brian
  • Some friends of mine support a 15 gig (uncompressed) tape drive that starts at $300, $39 for the tapes.

    http://www.onstream.com if you wanna know more.
  • As compared to the ORB drive, you're only paying about 3x more, not 23x. The $700-$900 is the cost of the drive, nto the media (vs. $300 for the ORB drive). The media cost has not been set yet. I do agree that a new hard drive is still a better value, though.
  • Floppy Disks are one of the most versatile forms of media. That's why they survived for so long. That's ALSO why everyone made a fuss when the iMac didn't come with one.

    Long live the 3.5 Floppy!

    -- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?

  • Only question here is why would u want a 10 gig removable drive? What would u put onto those 10 gigs? Aren't 3.6 gigs enough?
  • when these things are $.05 a piece, we'll _still_ have these damned awful floppies.
  • *smack* Bad Accipiter. That's a bad Accipiter *smack*. Sadist.
  • I'd use it to store nearly 17 hours of uncompressed digital audio. That would let me take my 500 or so Grateful Dead DAT tapes and reduce them to, say, 30 discs. Hmm. I like that.
    I want a 200 disc jukebox of these!
  • I was going to make a smart-ass comment about it being a "windrive", but I actually read the faq first...*grin*...That out of the way, are they redefining "gig" again? It says that the 30 gig cartridge holds as much as 15 1 gig Jaz cartridges?!? I'm confused...
  • This sounds like yet another Orb.

    Although it finally made it to market, it's kind of a little too late, don't you think?

    In markets that actually support removable media (as in they buy and use them and don't just complain about them), they've kind of "standardized" on CDR for stuff they don't want back and Jaz for stuff they do.

    Any new product has to be more than attractively priced to get people to change. It has to be cheap AND have way more features, otherwise it's just a neat novelty.
  • Yeah, I just bought a new 10.1GB IDE made by IBM for about $175.

    Removable technology is great, but only if they get the prices down to a reasonable level. I'd much rather buy an ORB drive and get 2.2GB media for $30/shot than 5x more space for 23x the price.
  • Already been done...

    I have a PD drive (made by Panasonic, they weren't very popular but you can definitely find the cartridges around).

    650 MBs.

    Also reads CDs.

    Rewritable...

    Of course, I haven't gotten it to work in Linux (works fine as a CD-ROM, tho), but it's cool.
  • Soon I'll be able to cache large segments of the net! Though with DVD's here now, with a similar capacity, I don't see that this will be of much use to most people. Certain segments of society will definitely have a use for it (ie. webmasters, warez people, etc...) most people don't have a need for such space intensive files. It'll be nice though, the current media (zip, jazz, superdisk, etc...) seems to have enough room, until you try cramming that extra 10k on it. In its 10 and (eventually) 100 Gb version, this'll help alleviate that problem. It's always better to have too much space than not enough.

  • That's because only you and like two other people bought them. and syquest went belly-up. I agree that they are highly nifty, but they aren't colored like iomega's stuff, so nobody bought them. I have a friend in a similar predicament.

    Mike
    --

  • Yeah, I bought this fixed disk drive from SyQuest called a "SyJet". It was advertised as a removable drive, but for some reason it's impossible to find the "cartridges" that are described in the manual. I haven't seen them at any stores, and when I call places like MicroWarehouse and PCMall, people think I'm crazy.

    -Chris
  • For how much money, though? DVDRAM drive costs, what, $400-600 bucks? Castlewood's ORB is $200 and much faster.

    Who cares? People without trust funds. If you don't like it, don't buy it.
  • Actually, you are really close to correct. This technology is essentially a means of focusing light beyond the wavelength limit. The spot size of a focused beam is limited to the wavelenth of the light in question. this means that optical spots are forced to be fairly big. If you plkay some tricks with teh head design, though, you can overfocus the light. If you want to learn more, there's lots of neat information on the subject. Look up near field scanning optical microscopy. Unless I am really confused, the two techniques are essentially the same.
    As for data limitations, I thought terrastor's process was essentially temperatuer enhanced magnetic field recording. As far as I ever heard (and I admit, I didn't pay too much attention) there was no proof, ever, that what they did was really near field R/W. Perhaps it got fixed. As for the long term use, I think hard-drives still have a few years. There are some technical limits (namely the paramagnetic limit), but terrabyte high speed drives are certainly doable. Anyway, thats my two cents
  • Bought six of these drives and about fifteen disks two years ago for my school district. Within six months not one of the damn things worked. (Lots of clicking noises however) Not only have I had to junk the lot, but I lost over a dozen large presentations that can no longer be recovered. Switched to Zip drives and disks. Not a problem since (either in SCSI or Parallel config...) Now Zip is capable of 250 mb?? I'll have to try a couple of those for large programs I'd like to transport. The SCSI versions are far faster than CD-R..
  • I like the idea that it could possible replace a harddisk. Harddisks - as we know them - has been used since 1981...
    But well, even the newest harddisks are not fast and big enough.
  • SyQuest drives weren't terribly popular although I think they are way better than anything iOmega comes out with. Anyway about 8 months ago, probably long, SyQuest declared bankruptcy. Their web site is still open and there is a chance they might come back.
  • Oh my god you went to a Zip drive. Take it from me they aren't that reliable. I'm on my third zip drive within a year. The drives themselves killed 2 of my disks.
  • Goto OnStream's web site [onstream.com] and take a look at their 30GB and 50GB Desktop Digital Removable Drives. By far a better deal than this.
  • They're like cockroaches aren't they, those little sons-of-bitches! Just when you think they are extinct they raise their heads again.

    Perhaps after a nuclear holocaust they will be the only thing to survive??? Scary!
  • Hmmm, sounds famliar. Didja try sending them off to a data recovery agency, they are basically hard disk platters inside. I was kinda hoping this would work (I have about a years worth of artwork stored on a bunch of these) but haven't tried it yet. Switched to a CD burner, slow but reliable... so far.
  • what about access time, will it replace a HDD

  • VCR (Score:1)

    by bobby ( 109046 )
    Can you say: (serious) Random Access Video Recording?
  • Why having MP3 CDs instead of one 10 Gb removable drive?
    Why keeping all our video and audio on a HD when we use them juste sometime?
    Why put all your software on 20 CD when you have to reinstall them once a month? (Windowz problem!)
    Why not use it to make backup? If it's fast and secure, it's the device we need..
    Why....
  • I simply want one... but no money... I'm gonna wait... I think....

    there's enough space for all my MP3 on this disk...!!
  • How about a $250 drive that stores 650 megs on a single removable 5.25" disk. Total cost of 10 gigs: about $30. Patents pending.

  • I have this technology available today! (Score:3)

    by jerodd ( 13818 ) on Saturday April 10, 1999 @02:01PM (#1940201) Homepage
    It's some thingie made by Seagate. It's rather simple to plug in: there is a slot in front of my computer where I slide the thing in and make sure the cables are slotted firmly (for maximal reliability, it interfaces with the host eletrically instead of mechanically). It has around 10GB of space and very fast access times--less than four milliseconds.

    Each cartridge costs about $300 each new, but are available for much less from eBay (I recently got two of them for $150 each, including shipping and handling fee).

    Best of all, no new driver support is needed--simply unmount the disk, power it off with hdparm(8), remove it, and take it with me.

    It ways a 1/2 kilo, not much more than a Jaz disk, and holes twice as much. It uses the standard IDE interface, although SCSI models are also available.

    No special controller cards are needed: it appears a standard ATAPI DISK or SCSI FIXED device to your IDE or SCSI controller.

    I am, of course, talking about 10GB fixed disk, as I've been using since my first date with my PCjx's 10MB sidecar.

    Cheers,
    Joshua.

  • The one time I didn't hit preview... (Score:3)

    by jerodd ( 13818 ) on Saturday April 10, 1999 @02:02PM (#1940202) Homepage
    Arggh. s/ways/weighs/g\ns/holes/holds/g.

  • Really cool stuff... (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Shepherd ( 17338 ) on Saturday April 10, 1999 @01:24PM (#1940203) Homepage
    Reading through the article, it sounds like their Evanescent Coupling technique is a direct application of quantum tunneling, though the term and effect is more often discussed with electrons and discontinuous barriers, ie electrons tunneling through a barrier. Perhaps I don't have this right, any physics majors willing to correct me?

    It would seem even without the increase in areal density observed, the techniques involved with flying heads and SIL/Evanescent Coupling would revolutionize removeable media, allowing the speed lower latency of current Winchester media and the durability and reliability of MO media.

    I'm not sure myself why crescent shaped domains would aide and increase the areal density; is there some sort of implied overlap between data regions? Is it just a function of tighter packing? Or just smaller domains because of SIL and tighter laser focus/embedded magnetic coils in the flying head?

    Why wouldn't this be applicable to current magnetic hard drives then? Because magnetic forces cannot be shaped or focused in a way that optical beams can?

    AS

  • The big deal is... (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Shepherd ( 17338 ) on Saturday April 10, 1999 @07:20PM (#1940204) Homepage
    Magneto-resistive drives are highly suseptible to outside magnetic influence, so the use of optical writing methods help protect the data.

    Current magneto-optical devices are slow because of the head technology, and have relatively low density because of the size of the spot and magnetic domains.

    Combining the two allows for the stability of optical data and the density of magnetic storage methods...

    Unless you're being sarcastic, you're tape drive won't be of much use for large amounts of data needed to be accessed quickly...

    AS

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