While we marvel at the SSD's speed and potental sortage capacity it looks like IBM is trying to make spinning rust Drives last for Forever. https://fossbytes.com/ibm-1-bit-atom-magnetic-storage
cool science experiment but not going anywhere anytime soon.... you would need an electron tunneling microscope in your computer case and god knows how slowly it's reading/writing that single bit.
It would be to big and slow to be good for anything but archiving.
Well yes and no. IBM and other companies now have incentives to create smaller less precise ETM systems that can far less precise and still make this work. its not looking for the full contours/details just is this atom a North or a South not any concern about anything else.
So yes its still theory but its not as far off as you may think. I remember when inert gas filled drives for disk stability was tested years ago and now its an actual thing. It just took the precision welding tech to catch up. This is the reality of things but the rate of innovations coming to market are increasing as we continue to find new ways to make things smaller.
Why would it die? Different media for different purposes. We still use magnetic tapes, you know. And some black boxes still use magnetic wire as storage.
hope you're right... will take time to see ;)
It may never die if we could get some 50k rpm drives.
[clarkson_power.png]
Magnetic tape even for LTO drives is becoming more and more of a niche item. In the broadcast/video production industry which is my day job tape has become the least preferred deliverable and if it wasn't for a select few Large stations would be completely gone from Broadcast TV. From talking to people in other industries Tape for backup is starting to die off also. the same goes for Black Boxes in planes as Solid State media becomes reliable.
While its true in the short term that Magnetic media wasn't going anywhere. The long term outlook was not so good as data density was fairly static with spinning Rust. With the density of most Magnetic devices till this new process was designed was not really increasing due to limitations in the sensitivity of write heads and the necessary size of them we were going with high risk solutions to get more data space. The Helium and Shingled Write method drives that are new tech now are fairly risky all it takes is a failure in the casing for a drive to rapidly degrade and shingled writes are slower and more risky in terms of data corruption. All of this made the long term future of spinning rust look questionable.
Honestly HDDs have a lot more relevancy than consumer tech media gives them credit for. Until SSD median lifetime and cost per GB are comparable, they aren't going away on the budget end, and in enterprise, if you have 32-128 sets of spindles working for you in parallel on a SAN with a raid-aware FS, you're hard pressed to hit an IO bottleneck under even very heavy load.
Spinning rust isn't going away any time soon, whether they're immortal or not.
If I were allowed to I'd show pics from a data archival vault I inspected once. Tapes, Tapes everywhere and more new ones arriving. The cool thing about High density archival tapes is that doesn't take a particularly specialized devices to read data from them, and they have a proven long term storage track record. There's some specialized optical archive media too, but they're rather more the exception.