The future of hard drives?

According to reghardware British researchers have created a hard rectanglular drive. The media is double sided and fits within the confines of  3.5 inch casings used by current HDD’s and SSD’s.   The read-write layer is made up of a grid of millions of read-write heads that are created using the same lithography process that is used to make silicon chips like your Intel CPU.  The read/write mechanics are controlled by sending a signal to the appropriate row and column of the grid.  Multiple heads can be doing their work in parrallel , but the current limit is 64 heads active at any one time.

Sounds great doesn’t it.   So what does that mean for performance?  Well for one, power consumption is just 4W, which is about 1/3 of a current SCSI drive.   Second, the supposed claimed data transfer rate is 500 MB/s which is screaming fast.  My current Hitachi 1TB peaks out at around 130 MB/s, so this would be a huge performance boost, even if only half of the claimed performance was realized.

Right now Dataslide is working on gathering additional funding and licensing.  It will be interesting to see if this technology can live up to the proposed claims and if so, how soon the market will act to introduce the new technology.