Hard drive ‘speed limit’ discovered.

Posted by Les on Friday, April 23, 2004 at 08:57 AM. Read 552 times. Tags:
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The bad news: Scientists using a linear accelerator have discovered that there’s a limit to how fast data can be written to magnetic media.

The good news: The speed limit is still 1,000 times faster than any hard drive currently available can write data so there’s plenty of room for improvement yet.

Favorite quote from article: “Certainly we are not going to start packaging linear accelerators into hard disk drives, so the kinds of speeds achieved in these experiments would never be observed in an actual recording device.”

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Bdoserror Canada Posted on 04/23/2004 at 11:16 AM

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“Certainly we are not going to start packaging linear accelerators into hard disk drives”

I, for one, love to see prognosticators make absolute predictions like this for the future.  Inevitably, they’ll end up wrong.  Who’d have thought we’d be packaging lasers in something so small as a CD?  It’s just a question of need driving the engineering.

golix Great Britain (UK) Posted on 04/23/2004 at 05:27 PM

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Bdoserror
I admire your faith in technology especially since the “linear accelerator” in question seems to be, infact a particle accelerator, huge beasties which live underground, are about a mile in diameter and cost many billions each. But then you’ve got CDs with built in lasers.

Tish Australia Posted on 04/24/2004 at 08:21 AM

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Yeah, but I still want one! Wonder if they take AmEx?

Jim United States Posted on 04/24/2004 at 10:13 AM

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If there is a limit to throwing hardware at I/O performance, this might cause developers to return to design and testing.  {sarcasm}The horror of it!{/sarcasm}

Mike United States Posted on 04/26/2004 at 06:25 PM

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Like all technology this may be a decade or two away, but in time all things are possible. It isn’t even a matter of need as it is a matter of the product costing half as much to produce as it will sell for in an open market. Personally I would shell out a few grand for a hard drive that could write 1,000 times faster than my current unit.

Matt United States Posted on 04/27/2004 at 01:44 PM

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we will already have moved to optical computers by then

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