HDD to Morph Into 'HRD' to Beat SSD Comments

It's certainly interesting technology, even if it does have a stupid name. Fairly high power consumption too, the latest generation of SSDs are 1-2W.

They're claiming 160,000 IOPS for both read and write which is interesting, unfortunately they don't specify whether it's random or sequential. If it's both then that'll blow SSD's puny 500 I/Os for random writes right out of the water.

But still, Glass? Isn't that going to be fragile or heavy? I think notebooks may be sticking to SSDs even if this proves to be a better technology for desktops.

too many fussy new names. can't catch up with all those new techno junky. Give me a super fast computer I'll be happy.

@Xiphias - glass platters are common place in HDDs now http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_disk_platter so no worry there.

Presumably like SSDs power consumption at idle will be negligible? I also imagine it is virtually silent, and should be more responsive than HDD as there is no need to spin up from sleep/cold and no need to move heads large distances (i.e. super-low seek times). Ability to read from many heads in parallel also a boon, but will need some clever controller circuitry as the whole data substrate moves as one, so each head must be in the same relative portion of its "zone" at a given time. I imagine long term no reason not to have multiple platters which, unlike conventional HDDs, could be addressed independently (i.e. they needn't move synchronously).

For me, provided I've understood it correctly, is the potential for growth here. I would think that the growth in speed could be exponential too, as it seems they would merely have to allow more read/write heads to be active at once.

If it offers this sort of performance with 64, imagine 128, 256 or even 1024. Very clever idea.

@ Kingsley - Another example of the dangers of Wikipedia. Although some glass may be used in platters, the substrate (which is what makes up the vast majority of the platter, and is what the media layer is printed on) is generally made up of a glass-ceramic composite.

However, I'm not sure there would be a substantial difference in weight, as a quick Googling reveals that glass has a specific gravity of around 2.5-3 depending on type, while most ceramics are around 3-4 (again, depending on type).

@smc8788 - Hmmm. The link was intended as a general indication that "glass platters" is not a risky, new technological solution as suggested by Xiphias. If you want another link, try http://www.storagereview.com/guide2000/ref/hdd/op/mediaMaterials.html - I think "glass" is used as a sort of catch-all name in this case, rather like "LCD" in flat-panels covers a multitude of different technologies which differ at some level of detail.