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In Awe of Sturdy Hard Drives
emnmnme
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Registered User regular
It's magic through science. In any cheap HDD, you have a platter and a read/write head that work by magnetism and that platter spins like nobody's business at top speed. Most impressive is that the head and the platter never touch but are always close together - so close that a speck of dust would be a tight squeeze and a a single hair is impossible to fit between them. How is this possible? With the Gs the platter is spinning at, it seems to me that a single awkward glance would crash the whole thing. How is it the head isn't accidentally readjusted when you pick up an external HDD and put it in your backpack or you stub your tow on your XBOX 360? Even if the components are sealed up, I can't understand how this device stays calibrated and precise for several years with daily use.
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The short answer is yes.
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I'm not familiar with the ins and outs of the tech, but I don't see why not. Flash is just.....younger. So it'll take time to mature, but since it's a solid state storage device, I could see it becoming the standard.
Also, EVE Online's database is run entirely off of a solid state drive system. That's why they only have two servers for the entire world (Bloody fast).
Actually, as far as I understand, Flash memory is faster than HDD. I thought the only thing standing between solid-state and HDD was the crippling price. Something like a 10:1 flash/HD cost ratio.
This article has some of the arguments about the limiting factors, though I think you'd need to refer to come of those sources to be sure of the facts.
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There are even hard drives on the market today that can withstand vibrations and shaking, drops, and being submerged in deep waters. Fucking I N S A N E.
HDD has faster sequential read = Faster transfers of large single files.
Memory has faster random read = Faster transfers or random scattered files.
Which is probably due to the fact a HDD head would take time to bounce around different parts of the disk for random files.
The internet is only 197 Terabytes big.
That means the internet is only 197 harddrives! There are 300 million people in america!
For the price of 197 harddrives you could have the entire internet stored on your computer!!
I call shenanigans on this.
So yeah, that's two years ago, I wonder what it'd be up to now, with all these video and social networking sites exploding in popularity.
You can already find machines built with flash solid state drives instead of a normal spinny one out there. Most people (read "me" at least) are hoping something like MRAM manages to come though before Flash gets a complete strangelhold on the world though, because then you get the speed of normal RAM with the non-volitile properties of FLASH. Your machine could be "on" all the time really, even when it wasn't using electricity.
And here's where I'm getting puzzled - you can put a kitten inside an airtight safe, lock it, and then pick the safe up and spin around in circles for a minute. When you open that safe, that kitten is going to be dizzy. You can drop a wrench inside a submarine. There's still gravity inside of a vacuum. In those three self-contained environments, I still don't understand how a hard drive's parts don't jumble and bend when you pick them up or hold them upside-down.
Like a bumblebee being able to fly, it should be impossible to put your desktop PC in the back of your car and carry it to QuakeCon without damaging your HDD.
Now of course the drive does it automatically whenever it powers down, even if the power is cut unexpectedly. Plus posh drives have stuff like accelerometers that detect any excess G forces (like those cause by a drop or knock), and again move the heads out of harms way.
Fun Fact:
Before IDE became available, you used to be able to permenantly kil a hard drive by telling to to read from a nonexistant sector. e.g writing a little asm code in debug to get a drive with 1024 sectors to read from sector 9999 or whatever. Back then the drive would just slam the read/write heads into the drive casing. CLACKRUNCH!
I never did this and didnt have fun not doing it over and over again.
This would answer the age old question: Where is the internet stored?
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Did that CLACKRUNCH! sound like this one or more like this one?
No sir.
Sorry, no. The Transistor is the 20th centuries greatest invention. If you don't think so, you don't understand how they work.
NO SIR.
Definitely more like the very end of no.2. But combined with the noise of rocks being shaken in a biscuit tin. I would imagine...ahem.;-)
These were big buggers back then, approx 3/4 the size of a modern Shuttle type PC case. They often held in excess of 4 MEGABYTES!!!
It really amazed me when I bought a CF 2 gig HD a couple of years ago to see how much the technology has advanced. It's one of those things that make me feel like I'm living in 'THE FUTURE'!!
everyone knows the 20th centuries greatest invention was pot noodle. so you are double ewe arr oh engee.
and Iconoclysm i remember going to RePc (a recycling store close to Seattle) and saying a HD that was larger then my computer case and its magnetic drum( the piece that stored the data) was larger then a coffee can both my dad and i laughed about the 10MB that it must store.
but the same way HD's have grown solid state will grow just as fast, and it will soon likely be a reasonable idea to use solid state as a HD. but the cost for solid state will be larger.
That thread is made of awesome!