#, solid state storage will eventually take over drives as primary storage
drives will be relegated to a category somewhere between primary and tape
not in the next 5-10 years though

10 years ago 32mb ram cost you maybe $400
now you can get 1gb of ram for around $100
solid state memory is increasing in density
just not as fast as drive storage

8gb of flash memory costs under $400 i believe (unless it's bits)
of course the interface is damn slow (15-20mb/s write/read)
if you apply raid stirping across 8 cards it would speed it up
with drives there's always extra time used to line up the heads
i'm pretty sure this will either be insignificant or eliminated with flash
theoretically you would have a 64gb storage at 120-1260mb/s speeds
the drive would cost you both nuts

internal striping of current drives across platters is a fair ways off
(although internal striping is a good idea, its tough to tackle)
i think the next step would be two set of heads either end of the drive
pretty much a follow on to the whole 'dual' trend of everything
that way you can read/write a few things at the same time
or use it as some form of ecc/verification system
or make it do some weird stuff (like writing half with each set)

as for making drives 'faster', higher densities produce higher speeds
just not as much as incresing rotational speed
10 fold density (perp's theorretical max) at the same rotation speed means data can be spat out 10 times faster
unfortunately since not all data is contiguous (nor on 1 track) you often don't see the benefit

Seagate's technology sounds a lot like that in magneto optical drives.

Stop making them bigger and make them FASSSSTER!!!!!

In 5 years, Solid State will dominate consumer hard drive usage.
It's already faster than the fastest HDs (massively so in access time), much lower power, and with the right firmware, at least as error proof.

In terms of capacity, there's two things that are going to happen. The first is that existing HDs will be relegated to secondary drive status, only to be used for storing our media collections. The second is that network based storage will become much more common, both locally and remotely. There's already a router that has 160GB and will download torrents for you. How long before it's available with 500GB, and can also operate as a DVR? Beyond that, Google and other companies are preparing to provide services that will allow you to store your media online. The image services for this already exist, and are getting better. The audio services have a ways to go, and the video services have even further, but they are in the works.

Samsung will have laptops using just solid state within a year, and when you combine those with networked media storage, your computer can boot in 10-15 seconds, have no moving parts, have pretty damn good battery life, and still have easy access to all your media. Given that laptops are becoming more popular than desktops, it seems inevitable that Solid State will become the norm within laptops very quickly. They are currently at only 32GB, but 8GB would be fine for me to run an OS and all the apps I need. 16 might be better, but I could make do with 8.

Screw it just make cheaper larger solid state drives. DAMMIT!!

All I want it 20GB of really fast storage like that for my OS and Apps. After that I'll just store everything on platter based drives.

Where's the link to Hitachi patterned media animation?!

#8, Let's hope not for the good of the industry.

I think we'll have to wait until each company actually makes on of their drives to see the tangible benefits & drawbacks and make a decision on this one.

Are either of these techniques under patent to a single manufacturer?

I think Hitachi have the right idea... better than Seagate drives with frikin' laser beams!

Seagate wins on acronym goodness - HAMR time!