Tape drives are fast enough, says Quantum
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Rules out LTO as it begins the hunt for DLT's fatter successor
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Company hopes increased storage will boost its format's fortunes.
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Researchers in London are developing DVDs that could hold 100 times more data than current discs.
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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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Israeli-based Mempile plans to demonstrate its TeraDisc technology at CES, where it plans to show a DVD with 500GB capacity. By 2011, it expects to have 1TB DVDs.
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(InfoWorld) - It's an interesting contrast: consumers are fast ditching videotape for DVDs and hard disks, but the people who make TV shows are sticking to tape for some cutting edge applications. When it comes to recording broadcast-quality HDTV, today's optical disc systems just can't spin fast enough to keep up with the video -- but that may be about to change. Current optical disc systems are speed-capped at about 10,000 rpm (revolutions per minute.) Spin them any faster and there's a danger the discs will physically disintegrate in the drive leaving nothing but a pile of sharp plastic splinters and data that is gone forever. And even if they don't break apart the disc can begin to wobble making reliable recording a problem. Engineers at the Science and Technical Research Laboratories (STRL) of Japan's public broadcaster, NHK (Nippon Hoso Kyokai), are working on an optical disc recording system based on consumer Blu-ray Disc technology that can spin as fast as 15,000 rpm without these problems and demonstrated it last week. It's needed because broadcast quality HDTV signals of the type NHK records stream at 250MbpsÂ making a fast-spinning optical disc a necessity. A 1X Blu-ray Disc records at 36Mbps so the new system is equivalent to 7X speed. NHK has gotten around the stress problem by making a flexible disc that is just 0.1 millimeters thick. The disc, which was co-developed with Ricoh, is essentially the recording layer from a Blu-ray Disc without the 1.1 millimeter plastic substrate that is used to give the disc rigidity. It won't break apart at higher speeds but is not rigid enough to be useful in a drive at any speed. To solve this second problem a thick stabilizing plate has been added into the drive. When spun, the disc is kept steady by the stabilizer and can be used up to 15,000 rpm, said Daiichi Koide, an engineer at NHK STRL. The set-up is similar to Hitachi Maxell's Stacked Volumetric Optical Disc (SVOD) that wasÂ introduced in prototype formÂ at last year's Ceatec exhibition in Japan and shown again at Cebit in Germany this year. SVOD packs several 0.1 millimeter thick optical discs into a cartridge and holds them against a stabilizer in the drive to keep them steady while in use. However there is a key difference between the two, said Koide. In the NHK drive the stabilizer doesn't rotate. If it did it would be susceptible to the same stresses that as the discs. The result is that NHK can spin the disc up to 15,000 rpm without any mechanical problems. The system is still under development and there's no word on when it will literally be ready for prime time. NHK envisages cartridges stuffed with a number of the thin discs that can replace videotapes. Â
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The fundamental memory component of a quantum computer has been built for the first time using a string of atoms. This could offer a more reliable way to build a working quantum computer than other techniques, suggest researchers.
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InfoWorld - Quantum introduced a disk storage appliance Monday that could both appeal to enterprise customers and improve its partnerships with other storage vendors.
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British researchers have developed a scheme to store as much as a terabyte of data on a single video disk -- equivalent to 472 hours of video.
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Claims 18x burn speed The first fruit of Sony's optical drive partnership with NEC have arrived in Europe: a drive the company claims is the world's fastest DVDÂ±R writer, capable of burning single-layer discs at up to 18x speed.â¦
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The company has developed a prototype 120GB drive that it says improves on the perpendicular magnetic recording technology used in the current generation of drives.
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(Source: SEPATON) ESG Lab reviews SEPATON's enterprise-class virtual tape library systems to validate backup/restore performance of over 17TB per hour, dramatically accelerating data protection.  In addition, SEPATON's DeltaStor de-duplication software exceeded company claims of 50:1 de-dupe ratios to help companies mitigate growing disk storage costs. Uncover more "outstanding" results in the full report.
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fenimor writes &quot;Physicists at Imperial College London described a new method for potentially encoding and storing up to one Terabyte of data, or 472 hours of film, on one optical disk the size of a CD or DVD.
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Shared research produces fast, tiny memory ideal for consumer devices.
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The method uses a laser to heat the recording surface and alter its magnetic field. 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.
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Miniature hard drive will feature a Compact Flash card form factor.
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New line of flash memory cards will transfer data twice as fast as current cards.