Hard Drive Improvements

[Jim Fogle]

Here is a web article and video describing some of the technology Seagate, Western Digital and Toshiba are using to ultimately produce hard srives capable of storing 60 to 100 TB. https://www.engadget.com/upscaled-mamr- ... 23504.html

[Ian Rae]

The idea of variable coercivity is interesting - we're so used to it being a constant. Advances come from questioning assumptions!

[Jim Fogle]

The video embedded in the article has some scenes created by Western Digital that visually demonstrate these advances. I found the video very instructive.

The article also mentions other ideas under consideration. The idea of having multiple actuator arms makes sense as well as the idea of having actuator arms articulate to advance to adjacent tracks is clever also.

I have a 4 TB network drive I use for back up and storage. Since that drive is less than half filled after accumulating years of family files it is difficult to envision ever having the need for a 60 - 100 TB drive. I remember being awestruck after purchasing my first 1 GB hard drive. Wow, so much space! I have a hard drive removed from my first work laptop computer: 10 MB (megabytes)! The operating system, DOS 3.2, takes up a little more than 64 kilobytes of storage.

[Ian Rae]

Good point. It's not just data we need all this space for, it's the ever-more-complicated stuff we use to manipulate it with.

My aging laptop needs 80% of its RAM to do sweet all.

Circa 1985 I bought extra memory for my Commodore 64 - 45kB!