6TB helium-filled hard drives bump capacity, decrease power use

Re:6TB helium-filled hard drives bump capacity, decrease pow... by ChuckMcM on Monday November 04, 2013 @12:10PM (#6669715)

I think you should be careful about taking the notion of 'flying' the head too literally. Think of the air as a 'spring' which is holding the head at a precise distance above the platter, the head is pushing "down" and the spring is pushing "up", so if the head is too far away its down force is stronger and it moves closer, if the head is too close the air's "up" force is stronger so it moves away. This is simply a very precise way of placing the head over the platter, which is necessary because the shape of the magnetic field is a sphere and the 'circle' of its intersection with the platter is determined by the distance from the platter by the head.

In terms of the mystery thing 'x', most of what you might think of as candidate materials have been tried. The challenge is to reliably (well at least reasonably so) flip the state of a bit on the substrate in about a microsecond. And do that as cheaply as possible.

It is exceptionally challenging engineering.

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Re:6TB helium-filled hard drives bump capacity, decrease pow... by todayiamme on Monday November 04, 2013 @12:28PM (#6669837)

Your description is a much more precise way of looking at it. I was trying to reach for the same concept when I talked about fluid dynamics and the forces acting on the head cancelling out so that it rests at exactly the right distance, but I lacked the clarity to state it so neatly. Thanks!

>>> It is exceptionally challenging engineering. <<<

It's also very beautiful... When you look at something like that it's a bit like looking at a work of art - I don't know how to explain it but it is awe inspiring. I wonder how people end up working on such things... How do you get to the point where you can raise your sleeves and create a system as beautiful as this?

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Re:6TB helium-filled hard drives bump capacity, decrease pow... by snom380 on Tuesday November 05, 2013 @12:01AM (#6673300)

I don't think any one person can create a piece of engineering as complex as a modern day hard drive. There are just too many disciplines involved: Physical, electrical and embedded software engineering, applied physics, information theory for encoding the data and recovering from errors. But certainly a single person or group in those fields can be responsible for specific breakthroughs.

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