Amazing hard drive technology

[Chalenge]

Electronics have now been shrunk down to the atomic level! This is amazing technology and will make it a lot easier to lower power usage and therefore heat. It's going to be interesting to see where this goes!

http://www.wsj.com/articles/tiny-hard-drive-uses-single-atoms-to-store-data-1468854001

[Skuzzy]

I read about that yesterday.  Quite amazing.

[Latrobe]

That's awesome! Imagine how well Windows 10 can run on something like that! 

[Ack-Ack]

That's awesome! Imagine how well Windows 10 can run on something like that! 

Microsoft will figure out a way to screw it up, they always do.

[Skuzzy]

Unless a new file system is created, no version of Windows could make use of the potential storage size possible.  In a 3.5" form factor, at that areal density, it would yield a 4 platter hard drive capable of storing about 24 petabytes.

In order for the NTFS file system to use that much storage, then each logical sector would need to be about 5.6MB.  The fragmentation of the file system could be severe even if the operating system could use that large of a virtual sector.

Areal densities, this high, will require a new file system design.

[Estes]

That's awesome! Imagine how well Windows 10 can run on something like that! 

I lawl'ed 

[Latrobe]

We would just need to make a partition on it and put windows on that.

[Skuzzy]

We would just need to make a partition on it and put windows on that.

The logical sector size is calculated by the physical number of sectors on the drive.  The NTFS file system is limited to 2^32 number of sectors.  On a 24PB disk drive, that works out to be about 5.6MB for the logical sector size.

Given Windows NTFS file system is currently restricted to a 4K logical/physical sector size, you would only be able to use about 16TB of the 24PB.

A new file system is required to take full advantage of the promise of this technology.

[Gman]

Saw this too on a few tech sites - progress is coming fast as ever with PC HW.  So much future potential in this sort of tech, VR, GPU, now HD leaps as well...bright future is still ahead of us in PC/PC gaming, Win10 and whatever future annoyances MS foists on us notwithstanding of course, hah.

[Latrobe]

See Rule #4 (trolling)

[Drane]

Well then I'll just use an illogical sector size.

Latrobe I can't help feel that at some point Darwin will step in and have a chat with you. Let us know how that goes...

[Latrobe]

See Rule #4 (trolling)

[Chalenge]

Latrobe is just showing us all how little he knows about computers. This technology alone could usher Microsoft out the door as a member of the MISO group, as even SAP has stated that the Windows platform is currently being purged from their systems. It seems obvious that the cloud and Linux are the future, at least until a new idea comes along. I'm betting Amazon steps in with something soon.

[Meatwad]

Putting windows 10 on something like that is a very bad idea. Instead of windows crashing hard drives, it will crash atoms. And we all know what happens when atoms crash (or split, depending on how bad windows hoses things)

[Chalenge]

And there goes the whole understanding of physics thing. Skuzzy was right.