Solid-state disks coming on strong
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InfoWorld - If you&#39;re in any doubt that flash memory-based solid-state disks are on a course to quickly replace hard-disk drives in laptop computers, just take a look along the aisles of this year&#39;s Computex trade show.
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Is it true that hard drives can get tired or aged?
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By Brier Dudley, Seattle Times  Feb. 19--I saw some amazing data centers in Redmond last week.   They were reliable, powerful, resilient and fault-tolerant.
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New 1.8-inch hard drives may boost battery life in portable devices.
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Not just for laptops now, too Intel has become the latest chip maker to offer a Flash-based solid-state hard drive, though it's pitching the part not as a replacement for magnetic hard disk storage but as an adjunct to it.â¦
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Tiny 20-GB wireless drives are coming this summer from Seagate, the world leader in magnetic storage. In Gadget Lab.
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(InfoWorld) - Researchers have demonstrated disk write speeds one hundred times faster than current hard drives. The method uses a laser to heat the recording surface and alter its magnetic field. There is no equivalent read speed increase though. According to a report in Science Now, Dutch scientists at Radboud University Nijmegen used a laser to send flashes of polarized light to a 5-micron-wide spot on a disk surface which was heated. The sheer angular momentum of the photons hitting the recording surface was then able to flip the magnetic field if the light was polarized one way, but left it unaltered if polarized in the other direction. A traditional magnetic field reader was then able to detect binary ones or zeroes accordingly. This shows the promise of heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR). The laser flash duration was 40 femtoseconds -- 40 billionths of a millionth of a second -- which is 100 times shorter than the time needed for a current write head to change the magnetic field direction on a hard drive disk recording bit. Thus there is the promise of increasing data writing speed up to one hundred times. This will enable hard disk data writing speed to better keep up with ever-faster data transfers across networks. However there are problems to be resolved. Firstly the recording area, at 5-microns wide, is very much bigger than the sub-half micron area in today's hard drives. Drive users won't accept a substantial decrease in areal density, meaning lower disk capacity, as the price of a substantial speed increase. However, the researchers expect to get it down to a 10 nanometer area. A second problem is that the read component of the disk head remains magnetic and there is, as yet, no technology promising a hundredfold increase in read speed. Physicist Julius Hohlfeld of the Seagate Research establishment in Pittsburgh says that a third problem is the need to have an affordable laser that can fire 40 femtosecond pulses. Daniel Stanciu, co-author of the research paper, expects a working prototype within ten years, which means that a commercial product could be 13 to 15 years away. That would take us to 2019 or thereabouts. Seagate has suggested that HAMR could increase area density to 50Tbit/sq inch by 2019, meaning a 40-50TB 2.5-inch hard drive would be theoretically possible.
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Over the next two years network based storage virtualization will remain a niche, while thin provisioning will enjoy rapid adoption in the enterprise. And, applying network-based storage virtualization to pool arrays isn't likely to improve this environment if efficient utilization hasn't already been achieved.
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A new type of memory could soon be available to device makers.
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News and survey results from Computerworld's twice-annual storage conference.
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Shake it, baby CES on Video Vigorously shake a hard drive and you'll kill it. Lexar Crucial reckons that's just not a problem with Flash-based solid-state drives, and it set out to prove it...â¦
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Flash-based solid-state hard drives and machines containing them are plentiful at this year's Computex.
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The 64GB solid state drives will be available in Dell and Alienware laptops soon.
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Imageon boosts DVD resolution, and new Geode conserves power.
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By Anonymous  Modular disk storage array  PowerVault MD3000, a direct-attached storage (DAS) array, uses dual active/active RAID controllers to produce up to 1.4 Gbps of throughput and approximately 90,000 I/O operations per second.
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New Hitachi drive represents a giant leap forward in  notebook storage.
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Storage Expo Iomega punts a hard disk autoloader