The toman diaries

Airbag harddrive

tirsdag, oktober 07, 2003

IBM has relased ne notebooks, which contain a new technology they call APS, Active protection system.

It consists, they say, of a microchip that senses acceleration, which in turn freezes the drives' head movement.

The IBM's pressfolks use this analogy: the airbag in your car.

I'd say it compares more to the servo-steering in the same car. - Or the servo that is used to detect unwanted resonance in sound-systems. This kind compares the electricity fed to the loudspeaker driver with the movement the membrane itself exercises. If it moves too much or too little (as a result of sound-waves piling up in the cabinet or the room (think sex in your bathtub)), within a few milliseconds the electronics will try and produce a signal that cancels this pile without affecting the sound in a negative way. This is hard and requires some AI.
I guess thats why IBM only stops the head and doesn't try and compensate.

Really nice, I must say. Why didn't anyone think of it before? Why isn't all electronics fitted with this kind of, eh, electronics? Maybe the time is out for physically moving electronics anyway? -Hardware storage in the form of MRAM will become commodity storage in a few years. Swedish scientists are advancing towards higher temperature operation.

If the 2004 estimate is true for ordinary memory, I think we'll see MRAM used as the main storage medium in normal PC's only a few years after that.
Hard-drives as we know them will probably then be used the way tape-drives are used today: Backup.