[aravind_a]

Has anyone considered using a solid state electronic head instead of the current mechanical one for hard disks ? I am considering a slab of silicon or other material with thousands if not millions of heads which can be digitally selected and data read from the underlying disk without any need for mechanical movement ?

 

[crazijoe]

Hello and welcome to TSF.

Sounds expensive and not really cost effective. It would probably cheaper to create a RAM drive.

 

[kev1952]

Not a bad idea but, as Joe said, would be very expensive. The current electro/mechanical setup works very reliably and is cheap to manufacture. The technology is evolving very nicely, allowing us to have drive capacities today that, even a few years back, were previously in the land of dreamtime.

 

[aravind_a]

Hi,

Thanks for the encouragement guys. I share a few more points I think
are applicable even if the technology costs more:

1. IF/When put into silicon the current count of a few thousand cylinders
can be increased to a few 100 thousands or a million. This would pack the
information in much closely packed cylinders of course without violating the
atomic or magnetic interference limits. This means even the current 40GB
disks can be converted to 40TB disks by just changing the head assembly.
We could have 1inch wafer thin disks with tremendous capacities

2. By using a fixed slab of semiconductor instead of a moving mechanical
head which currently flies over the Hard disk surface,
storage can be made drop proof and more rugged and disk crashes prevented. This would enable it to be used in more wider appliances. With added capacity they could easily sit in Digital cameras, camcorders, televisions to record programs, ipods with endless music, mobile phones which run the full version of various operating systems.

3. By using a fixed piece of silicon with a large number of heads and
stretching it across the diameter of the disk would enable read writes on multiple cylinders at the same time exponentially increasing data rates
from/to the disk surface exponentially, which currently is the slowest
part of any computer.

4. By using fixed piece of silicon with a large number of read/write heads
we can reduce the current or the strength of the field required to write data
onto the disk.

5. Having a million sensors and getting information from them is much similar to having a million pixels on a CCD and getting info from each of them. So
I am sure the fabrication part at least is technology already known. Only
the sensing of the magnetic data using a solid state system probably needs
to be designed new.

Thanks for your time in reading through this.

 

[kev1952]

I have no doubt that absolutely monstrous capacity drives are going to be with us in the near future - whether they do it the way you suggest (which I think is a very good idea, BTW) or not we'll just have to wait and see.

 

[dai]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid_state_disk

 

[aravind_a]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid_state_disk

Hi, I am talking of a modern spinning disk drive!!! I would just like
the head assembly changed from something that moves to
something that is stationary with one head per track/cylinder.
The rest of the device would still be identical to what it is today.

Hope this clarifies the issue.

 

[kev1952]

I'm sure that both Dai and I realise that. The link that Dai gave, tho', does give some insight into what the future may bring.