Two reports today on new hard drive technologies: the first is from Robert X. Cringely, a pseudonym for someone who writes a technology column on the PBS website. Those of you who have read my posts on the Lockergnome website and in their newsletters have seen me mention his name often - I regularly read his writing, which is usually out on Fridays. In this column, Cringely reported on Anil Nigam and Jim White, and their company, Antek Peripherals, Inc. They have invented a new storage technology that

…replaces the aluminum or glass platter in your hard disk drive with a “platter” made from stainless steel or titanium foil that is 22 microns or 25 microns thick, respectively. The materials cost more but we use so much less of it (the disk is so incredibly thin) that the total material cost is substantially less. This “floppy” material has the same kind of magnetic coatings used on standard disk drives and our drives live on the same technology growth curve as those others. The way we obtain greater storage density is simply by putting more platters in a drive (say 12-15 instead of 4-5 in an enterprise 3.5-inch drive) because they are much thinner and can be stacked closer together. The only parts of the drive that are significantly different are the platters and the heads and the heads vary only in having an extra slot. There is no rocket science here, but what science there is is patented.

The technology is far more resistant to shock, not sensitive to temperature extremes (Hey! Finally, hard drives in our cars!), far less dust sensitive, run cooler, and allows for larger capacity drives that require far less energy to operate. This technology is a year or two down the road.

A technology that’s available today is one that Windows Vista supports: hybrid disks. They are a combination of current drive tech and

…flash memory that works like a buffer between the computer system and the hard disk. The memory is used for short-term storage heading both to and from the disk and reduces the amount of time the disk spins. That will reduce power consumption; a performance boost is also expected because reading and writing data from flash memory is significantly faster than from a disk.

Exciting times are coming soon for hard drives - you thought a 500 GB drive was big? Just you wait! The other major advantage I see is that it appears that the ‘foil’ tech would create more durable and longer lasting hard drives with less worries about data backup. The current saying in the industry is that hard drives do three things really well: read, write, and fail. :-( With less failure happening there is less need to back up. That also means less work for guys like me - but I’ll take the tradeoff!