Hitachi Goes Perpendicular

Nimrangul writes "Hitachi has recently announced perpendicular recording with their harddrives, allowing for 10 times the data storage on a disk, meaning 20 G microdrives are on their way as soon as 2007. Hitachi is so pleased with this technological development that it has broken into song." This is, without a doubt, the most surreal thing I've seen today. Flash Required.

If you can get high before you watch this

[SweetAndSourJesus]

I strongly recommend it.

Re:If you can get high before you watch this

[HDlife]

...The creators certainly did!

mmmm, mmmm, Get perpendicular, mmmm, mmmm
(I just can't stop)

Re:If you can get high before you watch this

[ZeroZen]

Need a mod option AWESOME

Re:If you can get high before you watch this

[ImaLamer]

It's true, being high does make this video so much better. I disagree that it's goatse for your ears [slashdot.org].

I only wish it was an mp3 or even mp4 so I can watch it everytime I get high and so I can send it to my friends. If it wasn't flash I'd bet it would get passed around a lot faster. Hitachi has scored big time with the "groovy" factor, and if you've seen this [apple.com] you know how important groovy is.

Very well done. I would actually have that play when I woke up daily. It's sound and content brings my two favorite

Re:If you can get high before you watch this

[taviso]

$ sudo emerge media-gfx/swftools
# non gentoo users: http://www.quiss.org/swftools/
$ wget http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/research/images/pr%2 0images/Get_Perpendicular.swf
$ swfextract --mp3 Get_Perpendicular.swf
$ xmms output.mp3

Re:If you can get high before you watch this

[NeedleSurfer]

yeah Linux is very easy to use and its desktop ready...

I just set my card to record the playback of my computer... and press record, duh! but that was too obvious I guess

If not...

[elgatozorbas]

you will be afterwards.

Re:If you can get high before you watch this

[Taladar]

I am running the same (Gentoo AMD64 64-bit) and my Opera runs Flash fine. Perhaps you should use it instead of or as addition to your 64-bit compiled firefox.

Re:If you can get high before you watch this

[October_30th]

I don't think you can use a 32-bit Flash plugin in a Firefox compiled using 64-bit libraries...

For Your Referencing Pleasure

[MrNonchalant]

For the clueless among us, it looks like they're trying (and sorta failing) to emulate Schoolhouse Rock [wikipedia.org].

Re:For Your Referencing Pleasure

[generalleoff]

Yea they did. But I think they did it just lame enough to be funny as hell :)

Re:For Your Referencing Pleasure

[Seumas]

I'd hardly say that's failing. That was really well done. I loaded it up, expecting it to be stupid and hating it. Not only did I learn something (recalling the huge uninformed slashdot debate earlier in the week when the story first broke), but it was very amusing. Just enough tongue-in-cheek not to be condescending, but silly enough to be followed by total gits.

I'm not quite old enough for the Schoolhouse Rock stuff, but I've seen a few snips here and there (I'm not quite yet 30).

Re:For Your Referencing Pleasure

[Surur]

I agree. Its amusing, informative and explains the benefits of the technology in terms consumers can understand (more songs on my mp3 player). It also provides a superficial explanation of the tech which even slashdotters can grasp ;)

Overall though reminds me of a Fark contest. Imagine if all the latest tech news was explained in this way.

Surur

Re:For Your Referencing Pleasure

[mark-t]

It looks to me like they are satiring Schoolhouse Rock, and I'd say they succeeded quite well.

Re:For Your Referencing Pleasure

[Nutria]

They were imitating, not satirizing.

Satire:
1. A composition, generally poetical, holding up vice or folly to reprobation; a keen or severe exposure of what in public or private morals deserves rebuke; an invective poem; as, the Satires of Juvenal.
[1913 Webster]

2. Keeness and severity of remark; caustic exposure to reprobation; trenchant wit; sarcasm.
[1913 Webster]

Syn: Lampoon; sarcasm; irony; ridicule; pasquinade; burlesque; wit; humor.
[1913 Webster] Satiric

Re:For Your Referencing Pleasure

[Dystopian Rebel]

I would not call this a failure AT ALL.

I learned several dance moves.

Re:For Your Referencing Pleasure

[C0rinthian]

I still havn't forgotten "Conjunction Junction"

Re:For Your Referencing Pleasure

[fdiskne1]

I still havn't forgotten "Conjunction Junction"

Symantec has that song in their on-hold rotation. No, I'm not joking.

Only one thing occurs to me right now...

[AaronBrethorst]

"There's a lot of flag-burners who have got too much freedom. I wanna make it legal for policemen to beat 'em, cuz there's limits to our liberties... At least I hope and pray that there, cuz those liberal freaks go too far..."

Yeah, that was pretty surreal, not Mini-Me-being-spanked-by-a-6-foot-tall-woman-on-VH 1 surreal, but more than enough for a drunken Friday night.

Re:Only one thing occurs to me right now...

[AaronBrethorst]

Apparently whoever modded me down is not a Simpsons fan... What a sad day.

In the post-9/11 world, ...

[chris_eineke]

In the post-9/11 world, all hard-drives are terroristicular. ;)

Re:In the post-9/11 world, ...

[Knnniggit]

For some reason I read that as "testicular."

This is not good.

In sovi..

[Tibe]

In sovi.. Ah screw it, in Soviet Russia they don't make weird crap like that.

Get Perpendicular

[inKubus]

In Post 9/11 America, the bits have to stand up straight or terror will win.

Re:In sovi..

[kasparov]

Have you seen Russian cartoons [wellesley.edu]? Trust me, they make weird crap like that.

School House Rock

[SumDog]

Before you skip over this as a dupe, you need to check out the flash animation.

Damn this thing screams a nerd verion of school house rock!

Re:School House Rock

[Seumas]

All technical information should be conveyed this way! Seriously, can you imagine how well this would work to teach difficult concepts to people who are otherwise not entirely technical? Or, for that matter, for some of us industry insiders, too. No more thumbing through convoluted RFCs. Just load me up a flash animation with a funky beat!

*snicker*

I need my bits perpendicular so I can store more naked horizontals.

Re:School House Rock

[Seumas]

I propose that once these drives become standard, we start saying "oh shit - my bits fell over!" when our drives crash or data becomes corrupt.

You heard it here, first (I think)>

Re:School House Rock

[Igmuth]

You just caused me to picture a bit on a drive saying "I've fallen, and i can't get up!" Now someone needs to invent medialert braclets for you harddrive...

technical manga

[RotJ]

In Japan, a lot of product manuals, corporate PR documents, and government documents are published in manga form. Morita Akio, co-founder of Sony onced asked his young female skiing instructor if she had read his autobiography Made in Japan. She told him "no, but I would have read it if it was a manga." So he had an artist adapt his book into manga form, naturally.

The informational manga genre was mostly spurred by the publication of A Manga Introduction to the Japanese Economy [dnp.co.jp] and A Manga History of Japan (Manga Nihon-no-Rekishi in the 1980s.

Re:School House Rock

[alset_tech]

All technical information should be conveyed this way! Seriously, can you imagine how well this would work to teach difficult concepts to people who are otherwise not entirely technical?

That's a great idea! I've been working on a cartoon paperclip to assist people when they write documents. He helps you format your docs through song. Imagine "Looks like you're writing a letter," sung to the tune of Perpendicular, only out of key and really loud. I'm thinking of calling him Clip-... whoops.

Re:School House Rock

[owlstead]

Before you skip over this as a dupe...

Too late, I already skipped over it!

Meow Mix the Sequel

[robotsrule]

This song will probaly stick in my head for weeks just like the "meow, meow, meow, meow" Meow Mix commercial jingle did. I am going to sacrifice a small hard drive as an act of contrition.

Re:Meow Mix the Sequel

[mangus_angus]

may you forever burn in some sort of hot microsoft infested pit....I haven't seen that in years and now it's back in my head louder than ever....I bow to your evil.

Marketing works

[nysus]

Hitachi (ah, see, I remembered the brand) has succeeded in getting everyone to believe that they are on the cutting edge of hard drive technology. While that may or may not be true, the key point is that perception is being largely disseminated by a cartoon and not hard data or facts. Interesting.

Re:Marketing works

[Maxiosu]

think about it - viral marketing at work.

we're all going to post this on our blogs/webpages and spam it out in forums/irc to laugh at hitachi... thus promoting their new technology

I, for one, welcome out new smarter than the average slashdotter overlords

Yep. Today slashdot, fark, etc, tomorrow...

[WoTG]

the other major news sites online and offline will all be talking about Hitachi's great technology to store 30 000 mp3's on the next ipod mini. A few bucks of marketing VERY well spent.

Double points for doing this with something so technical that most /.'s, never mind the general public, wouldn't be able to understand from a generic press release.

Re:Yep. Today slashdot, fark, etc, tomorrow...

[mithras the prophet]

Yep. Today slashdot, fark, etc, tomorrow...

And as with so many Slashdot stories, yesterday, Engadget [engadget.com]...

Re:Marketing works

[Detritus]

Considering that Hitachi acquired IBM's hard disk drive operation, which is responsible for most of the advances in drive technology over the past 50 years, I think it's fair to consider them leaders in drive technology.

Re:Marketing works

[wcdw]

The reason IBM sold their drive manufacturing division to Hitachi was at least in part because they could not compete.

Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) was making superior drives -- and far better arrays than both IBM and EMC -- *before* the purchase.

So why did Hitachi buy? IIRC, it was because they were interested in some of the patents.

Re:Marketing works

[wcdw]

I guess you didn't read e.g. the article KingSkippus linked to. Dated 1/5/03, that article reads, in part:

IBM had lost more than $500 million over the last two years in the hard drive business, which is notoriously competitive and yields thin margins.

"successful product lines"?!? Like the Deskstar? ;)

I remember talking to some HDS folks (mostly field grunts and account reps) about the deal, and they seemed to think it was a good thing. But the substance of those conversations escapes me now.

Old age,

Re:Marketing works

[Patik]

Yeah, but who outside of Slashdot readers knows that?

The point is that the cartoon can get the point across to a different type of audience, particularly the ones who want bigger and better MP3 players.

Re:Marketing works

[KingSkippus]

This is pretty old news [com.com] (C|Net, January 2003).

Re:Marketing works

[elgatozorbas]

Hitachi (ah, see, I remembered the brand) has succeeded in getting everyone to believe that they are on the cutting edge of hard drive technology. While that may or may not be true

How, 'may or may not be true'. You saw the bits, didn't you?!? Clearly this is true!

Re:Marketing works

[ErikZ]

They can turn a 300GB drive to a 3TB drive.

As far as I'm concerned, they're cutting edge.

Re:Marketing works

[Cloud K]

Somewhat similar to the Honda Change Something [honda.co.uk] advertising campaign, which used almost exactly the same idea... "we're so proud of this, we broke into song and look at this really cute cartoon we did".

They have a copy of the advert they had on TV on their website. It's a very catchy cartoon song which managed to convince thousands of brits that Honda are these really cool engineers who love revolutionising things and are all-round really nice, cool guys. And then it made them walk into work every mornin

Simpler Explanation

[amigoro]

Here [mithuro.com] is a much simpler explanation.

All the song and dance for that?

Re:Simpler Explanation

[gl4ss]

never mind the explanation - the song rooocks :)

Patents

[The Amazing Fish Boy]

I wonder if they can patent "a method of using disco music to make bits 'get perpendicular.'" Maybe if they crimp the disk, afterwards.

break the stereotype...

[helioquake]

And you thought Japanese companies are humorless??

Whoa. It's groovy, dude.

Jesus Christ

[brsmith4]

That's my new sig.

Re:Jesus Christ

[Ecio]

use it a sig but dont try to sing it to a girl you've just met....

Re:Jesus Christ

[balster neb]

I had the same idea, except that I've made mine a hyperlink.

I wonder how long it'll be before someone signs up in /. as Actuator Man.

Actuuuaaatorrr Maaaan!!!

Re:Jesus Christ

[Actuator Man]

About 54 minutes.

the perpendicular lifestyle...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm dancing! I'm dancing!

This was insanely clever. Will be a cult video within days... You have to admit it does educate...

The young kids

[jimbolaya]

It's already the rage with the young kids. My 17 months son watched the whole thing through, and clapped along with the applause at the end (so cute! He's going to be geek, just like daddy!). If that's not proof positive that Hitachi is on to something, I don't know what is.

Interesting...

[ErikZ]

So, how much faster can they spin the drives now with this improvement?

The 15k drives use smaller platters so they can withstand the stress of the high RPMs.

So what if you make them even smaller. The 36.6GB HD can potentially go up to 366GB now, but I think people would be very interested in a drive with smaller platters that goes 30,000rpm and is still 36.6GB.

Re:Interesting...

[mrchaotica]

If the psychotic flash video is accurate, the bits are closer together. Wouldn't that mean the data could be read at a faster rate without increasing the rotational speed of the disk?

Re:Interesting...

[Ami Ganguli]

Presumably yes, but I believe drive performance is dominated by seek time, not transfer rate. If the disk is smaller and rotates faster, the head can make it to a random piece of data more quickly.

Re:Interesting...

[ErikZ]

You believe drive performance is dominated by seek time, or you know drive performance is dominated by seek time?

Smaller disks=less area to cover to get to the data.

Faster spin time=less waiting for the data to come back under the head.

A drive that can only put out 60MB/s will put out 120MB/s if you can spin the platters twice as fast.

Put out a drive with smaller platters that can go 30,000RPM, you will have the best performing mechanical drive on the market.

So, is there a HD engineer in the house? 15,

Re:Interesting...

[Andy Dodd]

Centipetal force isn't the only issue people have to contend with when things spin fast.

Vibration is also an issue - At 30k RPM, things have to be PERFECTLY balanced or the drive will vibrate itself to pieces.

Re:Interesting...

[timeOday]

I believe drive performance is dominated by seek time, not transfer rate.

Well, that depends entirely on whether you're doing lots of little random access (server load, or booting up) or sustained read/writes (like video processing).

They're billing the initial market as microdrives, where access time shouldn't matter at all. For downloading lots of songs fast, or saving or uploading photos, what you need is high sustained speed. Seeking is infrequent, because media files are relatively big.

Re:Interesting...

[Seumas]

So, how much faster can they spin the drives now with this improvement?

Slower, actually. If you spin too fast (or bump the drive), the bits will fall over. And not just a few bits. You've seen dominoes, right?

(Yes, I'm being sarcastic. Knowing slashdot as I do, this has to be clarified).

Re:Interesting...

[Fortran IV]

So, how much faster can they spin the drives now with this improvement?

Slower, actually. If you spin too fast (or bump the drive), the bits will fall over. And not just a few bits. You've seen dominoes, right?

Remember, the bits are facing the direction of rotation, so centripetal force would be pulling them sideways. They're far more sensitive to sudden acceleration or deceleration, so these drives will take several seconds to spin up to full speed, and a sudden power failure will make all the bits

Re:Interesting...

[inKubus]

Interesting that you say that. I was thinking, and a hard drive read head basically is a sensor that senses peaks in magnetism at a small level. So because at a given RPM the peaks will be coming at a much higher frequency because the changes are closer together.

Re:Interesting...

[KingSkippus]

Maybe I'm just being dense (no pun intended), but if the density of the bits outpaces the read head's ability to keep up with the peaks, couldn't you just add another read head and have each one read every other bit?

Re:Interesting...

[WalksOnDirt]

"...platter goes supersonic."

Fifteen thousand RPM on a 3.5" drive looks like 156 miles per hour to me, unless I've miscalculated. Hardly supersonic.

Superwha?

[Doc Ruby]

Am I glad IBM sold their "moribund" HD biz to Hitachi. Even when funk and disco were king & queen of the dancefloor, IBM never had the balls to rip off "I'm Just a Bill" to enlighten us on superparamagnetism.

Well I'll be!

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck Strongbad. *This* is what Flash was made for.

Perpendicular!

[kuzb]

How much do you want to bet the price of these drives will get perpendicular too?

Re:Perpendicular!

[timeOday]

I mean just think if you could buy one drive that has 50gb of space from Maxtor, or you could pay something like 10% to 15% more and get a 500gb from Hitachi.

IMHO this never happens. Economics combined with patents almost guarantees there are never sudden leaps in price/performance. Even if the new tech is much cheaper to make, why price it below what is necessary to beat the competition?

The Gunther version....

[d474]

Oooo, you touch my Perpen-dic-ular,
Mmmm, my superparamagnetisms...

Funtatsic!

[Jacer]

I felt like I was high wighout any drugs or side effects!!! Reminds me of school house rock, but it serves it's purpose. It explains a fairly complex concept to that the lay people can grasp it. Personally, I'll hold out for 30 gigs of flash memory. mmmm solid state.

Is the cartoon accurate?

[boingyzain]

The cartoon was cute and all, but what I'm wondering is if its really accurate or not. Are bits really these square pieces on a platter? I always had the impression that they were magnetic grooves in the platter (thus why you dont put a magnet near it). I don't see how you could make grooves perpendicular, so I guess I'm wrong. I did RTFA, but it would be great to see a better explanation of it!

Soon you will upgrade size of you harddrive.

[JollyFinn]

In soviet russia hard-drives upgrades the size of YOU!

Increasing platter thickness

[rockhome]

Will this increase power consumption significantly?

Any idea how much the platter needs to be thickened? Seems to me the added mass will require more power to spin, meaning more heat as well.

Or am I just nutty?

Surreal?

[GrouchoMarx]

This is, without a doubt, the most surreal thing I've seen today.

And that's saying something [slashdot.org]. :-)

(Seriously, though, that's actually a very good use of Flash. Now if only all Flash commercials were that cool.)

direct swf

[cliveholloway]

http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/research/images/pr%2 0images/Get_Perpendicular.swf

Please, take drugs b4 - I only had beer, but hey, it nearly worked. I recommend mushrooms.

cLive ;-)

Been there, done that....

[Rixel]

My boss has been calling me and demanding I get Perpendicular for years....and my memory hasn't improved one bit.

ObSimpsons

[dangitman]

bit: But why can't we just make a law against horizontal bits?

Hitachi: Because that law would be against the laws of physics. But if we changed the laws of physics...

bit: Then we could make all sorts of crazy hard-drives!

Hitachi: Now you're catching on!

bit: What if people say you're not good enough to be in the laws of physics?

Hitachi: Then I'll crush all opposition to me, and I'll make Isaac Newton pay. If he fights back, I'll say that he's gay.

My name is...

[GeekDork]

My name is Troy McClure. You know me from movies such as "Blue Rays do it in High Density" or "When Magnetism Becomes Gigantic".

That was so Fxxking Cool!

[tekrat]

OMG! That was the best thing I've seen in weeks! Firstly, that took some time to come up with and it really works to explain the whole thing.

It was done with humor, decent music and good animation -- in short, Schoolhouse Rock style and it works!

How do I get that on tape to show other people?

Interesting write head

[Thagg]

People have been talking about perpendicular recording for 20 years, and if I recall correctly the big problem with all previous attempts was ensuring alignment between the heads. Previous attempts used a head on either side of the medium, and keeping those within micron tolerances would be well-nigh impossible.

Hitachi has a very small head writing the data, then the magnetic field lines diffuse through the medium, coming back out the same side in a much larger area that won't flip the bits at that point. Clever.

Thad Beier

If you're a digital pack-rat like me...

[kiddailey]

Here's a direct link to the SWF for archival purposes. [hitachigst.com]

Thank goodness they've come up with a way to make HDs store more data!

so where's the 7K500?

[jab]

Maybe the Hitachi folks should stop singing and concentrate on shipping. On January 10 Hitachi announced [storagereview.com] the 500GB 7K500 drive would ship "first quarter 2005". It is now mid April, where is it?

Re:Oh God!

[slavemowgli]

You obviously don't check Newgrounds often. :)

Re:Oh God!

[metlin]

Are you *kidding* me?

That was cool, catchy, geeky, original and quite imaginative, all at the same time.

I for one think it was really, really well done.

Get perpendicular...tra la la!

Re:Oh God!

[Saeger]

Well I for one found this flash video *very* unprofessional and uncorporate-like.

I will be selling all of my shares at once! There is no place for humanity in a *serious* corporation!

Re:Oh God!

[hdparm]

Try this [albinoblacksheep.com], then.

Re:Oh God!

[G-funk]

I love that fat guy, he rocks :)

In a horrible, car-wreck-eqsque "glad it's not me" kinda way... Like the starwars kid.

Re:Oh God!

[ggvaidya]

No, no, THIS [pathcom.com] is Goatse for the ears :)

Re:Oh God!

[lintux]

I guess you haven't heard the Free Software Song so far? :-)

Re:Isnt this....

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

No.

it lacked the fucking song and dance number.

HOLY FUCK WAS THAT CATCHY.

Re:Isnt this....

[Plaid Phantom]

HOLY FUCK WAS THAT CATCHY.

Get perpendiculaaaar!

NO! It won't go away!

Re:Good Grief...

[thesatch]

a working link: http://www.archive.org/download/dontcopythatfloppy /dontcopythatfloppy.wmv [archive.org]

Re:Good Grief...

[cliveholloway]

Errr, troll. Hello mods?

...with some changes...

[lxt]

...yeah - "Oh My God! You Killed Kenny" becomes "Oh My God! You Killed Another Feature!"

Re:people dont want big storage anymore

[KingSkippus]

Just my anecdotal experience is that hard drives are bigger and more reliable these days than they were back in the days of those old clunkers. Especially when you take into consider the higher demands we're placing on them.

Re:Creators

[afd8856]

Want some tapes? :-)

I thought it sounded a lot like some of Frank Zappa's tunes (look for Joe's Garage and Strictly Comercial).

Re:Bigger is better... maybe

[David Horn]

Hard drives aren't big enough for me. You ever tried working with more than an hour or so of uncompressed DV footage? Runs at nearly 1GB/minute, and if you have to edit it, you need yet another drive to dump the finished product on to if it's not going back to the camera. Modern drives are fast enough for what I want to do with them - roll on 1TB and above!