
Sound Waves Could Power the Hard Drives of the Future - elfalfa
https://theconversation.com/sound-waves-could-power-hard-disk-drives-of-the-future-50474
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strictnein
> "However, while solid-state devices are much faster they have a much shorter
> lifespan than hard disks before becoming unreliable, and are much more
> expensive"

They're still more expensive, but not by as much as they used to, and the
difference is shrinking rapidly. $300 for a decent 1TB SSD vs $60-$100 for a
1TB HDD. And lifespan? Unless you're _writing_ petabytes to them, you're going
to be fine. [0] I'm far more concerned about the lifespan of my remaining
HDDs.

[http://techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-endurance-
experim...](http://techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-
theyre-all-dead)

> "At the moment our simulations show data flowing at around 100mph (160kph).
> This sounds pretty fast, but we’d like it to be ten times faster."

What now? No, 100mph does not sound fast when talking about the speed of data.

Is there an Internet term for news articles that contain the word "could",
similar to those that end in a question mark? Seems like most of them could
easily add ", but most likely will not" to the end.

~~~
jws
I didn't see a reference to the length of the wire. But if we assume 1cm since
it fits in a chip, that cycles the entire data through in about 250µS. Not too
shabby for mass storage.

I'm assume you build a bunch of parallel wires since it is bonded to a piezo
electric substrate, I don't think you'd be able to zig zag a long wire back
and forth across the plane, the bits would all pile up on one end and… do
whatever they do.

I suppose a sufficiently clever person might make a drum, wrap it in wire, and
send the bits around. I look forward to installing drum memory on a computer
in 2025.

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dang
Url changed from [http://gizmodo.com/sound-waves-could-power-the-hard-
drives-o...](http://gizmodo.com/sound-waves-could-power-the-hard-drives-of-
the-future-1742083143), which points to this.

