I once had the chance to speak to Nobutoshi Kihara of Sony a few years back, and he predicted that memory would be the next big thing. Considering how fast memory densities are increasing, it turns out he was right.

Said to be the world’s highest-capacity 1.8-in. hard disk drive, the two-platter 100-Gbyte MK1011GAH uses perpendicular magnetic recording combined with tunnel magneto-resistive head technology. The 54 x 71 x 8-mm low-power drive comes in the “short” 1.8-in. form factor and uses only 0.3 W at idle and 0.12 W in standby.

Things have gotten to the point where HD-DVD and Blu-Ray are running the risk of being obsolete before they can even establish market primacy. Why buy a fragile single disk when you can download your movie to a big-ass hard drive?



  1. shhh says:

    Shhh… That content couldnt possibly be legal…

    The RIAA may be listening…

    Now, just run along and purchase your cd’s and dvd’s like a good american citizen

  2. Mark Derail says:

    Personnaly, I hate hard disks with a passion.
    The bigger they are, the more problem prone, the more you lose.

    Defective by Design.

  3. Smartalix says:

    2,

    What do you use in your computer? Tape? Solid State memory? Holographic drives?

  4. tallwookie says:

    I saw a build for a flash based sata array ( it was on hackaday.com) – silent boot – i bet thats what he uses

  5. GregA says:

    Omg totally off-topic… But you guys have to see this one before it vanishes.

    http://silakoff.blogspot.com/2006/12/hand-made-radioactive-monitor.html

    The guy made a “hand made radioactive monitor”

  6. GregA says:

    Just wow, another weird one(and totally off topic)… OS X fans tend to scoff at the notion of how primitive OS X is compared to windows, but check this out…

    This is for robotics, but its fully distributed programming model will allow consumer applications take advantage of the multi-core computers that we will all be using in the next few years. When I look at what apple research is producing compared to microsoft research, well Microsoft is easily 10 years ahead in the cutting edge technology. Is there any thing even remotely like this in Carbon? Linux?

    http://msdn.microsoft.com/robotics/default.aspx#3p

  7. ryan says:

    wow, incredible! that means if my member were a secondary storage device it could hold roughly……….150 GBs…..not bad

  8. traaxx says:

    Yep, that’s what I want. An entire library of movies and music tracks on a hard drive, so when the hard dies I can buy another. Then have Win Vista tell me I’ve used up my free reinstalls, have the DRM fail and need to rebuy all my movies and music tracks. Right, that’s what I want for Christmas.

    I your world you may have a great deal of faith in Tech and it’s ability mean times between failures, but I think it would be alot easier to just keep the $20/movie individually and just worry about the tranditional stuff. You know fire, flood, hurricanes, tornados and not add anything new to it. Anyway, how do you back-up a 750Gb hard drive, with another 750 HD????

  9. sdf says:

    Anyway, how do you back-up a 750Gb hard drive, with another 750 HD????

    If you value the 750GB, sure.

  10. doug says:

    #8. What I want is both – I want to be able to rip my videos from physical media to a HD device so I can have a library to carry around in a portable video device, without having to worry about HD failure. Also, such a setup would be great for couch-potato access to everything you have without shuffling disks around. Every season of the Simpsons on a video iPod or set-top DVR sound good?

    Unfortunately, the MPAA is bound and determined to stand in the way of my dreams.

    Anyway, I am skeptical about the idea that the next-gen of DVDs are going to be quickly obsolete. People WANT the physical media, for pretty basic reasons – as you note, DRM makes HD failure a chance at losing access to your downloadable media. My iTunes music could become inaccessible. The songs I ripped from CDs, not so much.

    Throw in the fact that the “broadband” most people have would probably seriously choke on a high-def movie and the prospect of widespread access to fiber to the home are questionable for the next few years (at least in the US), and physical media will have a role to play for some time.

  11. ECA says:

    1. its STILL magnetic media…
    2. I want an implant…. NOW…behind my ear. and an extration port on my finger….

    PLEASE…

  12. Tom 2 says:

    Niccccce.

  13. Mark Derail says:

    Said I hate’em, not that I don’t use’em.

    I have a tiny USB drive that holds 2 gigs. Remove the packaging, how big is it really?

    Now occupy that volume for Toshiba’s 1.8″ hard drive, and you end up with just as many Gigs, if not more.

    Haven’t any of you noticed the trend of hard disk failures increasing? It’s quite bad. Especially in the smaller footprint used in laptops.

    I would prefer a Raid-5 integrated inside of one regular size hard disk.

    Imagine having a smaller capacity, say 160g instead of 500g, but it comes with a guarantee that you can’t lose your data under normal use.

    Then I’d like HD’s a bit better.

  14. J says:

    #3

    Hey I use punch cards so don’t knock them!!! 🙂

  15. TJGeezer says:

    I don’t know if this is off-topic, but Intel CTO Justin Rattner recently blogged at http://blogs.zdnet.com/OverTheHorizon/?p=11 that he sees nonvolatile NAND flash memory getting huge very soon. First generation of disk cache NAND is 1GB and fits on a PC card. It could be the whole storage technology is shifting again.

    Pertinent quote: “In the not too distant future, we can expect to see magnetic disk drives relegated to the role that tape drives play today, and even DIMMs may vanish from future motherboards.”

    Sound like snake oil? It’s the Intel CTO going on record there…

  16. Improbus says:

    Is there a pocketRAID device in my future? I hope so!

  17. Harold West says:

    #17 Sounds light the whole Intel “Bubble Memory” gambit again. Intel wants a piece of the storage market .

  18. TJGeezer says:

    #19 Well, Rattner’s a geek and is probably subject to geeky enthusiasms. Still, as Intel CTO, what he says carries some weight, I’d think.

    Running that item right below the bubble memory item has a nice touch of irony, doesn’t it…

    “Never predict anything, especially the future.”

  19. ECA says:

    14,
    already read ‘Shadowrun’

  20. Angel H. Wong says:

    100GB of mobile pr0n *grin*

  21. ECA says:

    Put a wireless Hookup to it… Inside your head.
    Walk to a friends and Connect to it, and do Anything.

  22. ECA says:

    Johnny Neumonic??

  23. RBG says:

    I like the idea of recording video to a high capacity video drives. But with all the mechanical parts involved, I can’t see how it would ever be cheap enough to compete against the simplicity of a Blu-ray or HD-DVD disc. And while the same is presently true for RAM cards, doesn’t it make sense that since these cards are esentially made via a glorified printing process that someday they will be dirt cheap enough to use as archive?

    RBG

  24. ECA says:

    25,
    yep and they already are…
    But consider a Dermal implant that lets you stream Video to a pair of glasses you are wearing..
    Or being able to shunt to the device, before you leave the house, ALL your emails to be read, and the days paper, to sit back in the train, bus, taxi, and read as you go to work.
    SD size DVD is about 2-3gig per video…you could install 30+ videos, for that Long train or Airplane flight you are taking…animations, what ever…Or maybe even a book to read.

  25. James Hill says:

    #22 – Your mom must be popular. DURRRRR…

  26. Bob says:

    I am having a problem with my hard drive. I connected another harddrive to my computer and I have done some work on that harddrive and removed it and after that. My original hard drive got messed up. I am using Windows XP SP2 and now my harddrive reboots giving a blue screen right after first windows logo screen. If I don’t turn off it reboots continuously. I had to install XP again and i did but installing it on the same directory on C: So now I have 2 Windows directory. I cannot reach the information and files that are from the first windows installation. My documents are not accessible. I don’t know what to do. I tried every single thing but I failed. I tried to do restore but my computer did not allow me to boot to MS-DOS. Eventhough I did not set an administrator password, it kept asking me that when I try to reach recovery console before I installed the XP again. I don’t know what to do right now. Please help me on this issue if there is any other way to save my information from the hard drive.

    THANKS IN ADVANCE.


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