Comment by replax | Hacker News Reader

Comment by replax | Hacker News Reader

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Well the article mentions that:

"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.

SSD read/write speed is pretty much limited by cost and bus speeds, not technology, as for the foreseeable future you can boost it by putting more chips in parallel (which is why current high end SSD solutions are pretty much all on PCIe cards, because they're already way too fast for SAS or SATA etc.). The same would probably become the limiting factor for this technology too, even if they can solve the read speed issue.

On top of the read problem, they have to deal with the fact that HDDs are just really energy-inefficient. With the world going to mobile, we can't predicate the future on the need for moving parts.

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.

Yes, you're right the world is going mobile and in mobile less (no) moving parts is better (more durable etc.) That is also why I think that consumer grade devices will be unlikely (unless read speeds are bumped up, too)

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.

Fair enough. It's hard to see where these kinds of write (but normal read) speeds would be necessary, even in a server farm, but I guess the beauty of enabling technologies is that they allow for use cases no one could have imagined when they were conceived.

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