LabRats #082: Perpendicular storage, eh?
There’s a limit to your hard drive’s capacity. Physically speaking, it can accommodate only this or that many pieces of information. But imagine, if you will, that you’ve organized those pieces differently. Can you squeeze more of them into the same space?
Turns out you can. Sean Carruthers and Andy Walker discuss the perpendicular storage technology that lets computer builders increase a disk’s storage capacity by leaps and bounds. All of a sudden, we’re speaking of terabytes here, not gigabytes. Sean and Andy, practical jokers as always, use dough and cheese to build a model that would help explain the concept. The perpendicular storage idea itself has been around since 1976, but it’s only now that its time has come, at long last. Earlier technology just wasn’t sophisticated enough to let computer makers build such sophisticated drives.
The idea was simple and straightforward enough, it was the implementation that turned out to be a tough nut to crack. But, at long last, it’s here. Get your own Seagate Barracuda 7200.10, too.
