How would the performance compare to a SSD?
"This revolutionary method allows the recording of Terabytes (thousands of Gigabytes) of information per second"
Therefore, If you can write 1TB/sec the seek it would pretty much outperform any SSD cluster, in terms of writespeed. unfortunately, nothing is said about read speeds/access times and I assume that that will be a harder problem. Because they are still storing the data magnetically and the platters don't emit heat based on their polarisation, they still have to pretty much read like normal hdds do. You cannot (until now, like it was not possible to alter the magnetic polarisation of metals other than with another magnetic field) sense the polarisation except for with another magnetic field.
I am really interested in how that will turn out, but before they make a significant advance in read speeds I doubt that the technology will make it into consumer grade HDD's any time soon.
It's a damned cool technology, and I hope it leads to something useful, but I just can't see it becoming the prevalent paradigm.
But mobile, in our case, means also a shift to the cloud, where significant more potent storage technologies could make a real difference. I really hope, too, that technology will lead to something new.
Actually, hold on, I wonder if seek would improve very noticeably? Is seek time mostly the long-distance movements of the head, or the locating of the file in-track after the head has traveled? If it is the latter, you might be able to boost seek quite a lot.
Though what you're really going for here is "access time", which is "seek time" (properly defined as just the lateral movement of the head) + "rotation time" (what you call "locating of the file", which is actually just sitting there waiting for your 7,2k rpm to come around once every 4ms or so - rotating disks rotate at a constant rate, you can just do the math). A Western Digital Caviar Blue (random benchmark, I only know this because it was the last drive I bought) has a ~9ms seek time.
To recap:
Access time = seek time + rotation time ( + negligible other times, well under 10~100us)
Rotation time ~4ms (3ms for 10krpm) Seek time ~9ms (supposedly ~4 for really high end drives)
Now this is just with the technology we have right now. I do not know enough about the constraints on hardware to know if they could push the limits. For instance, if the actual write (/read?) bandwidth could theoretically be higher, would it be possible to just rotate the disk faster and/or bump up the head seek time?