Underappreciated technology thread

It's barely the evolved form of magnetic tape and a glorified floppy disk

i think the reason the head does not crash, is due to the head literally flying over the disk, eg the air or gas current makes just the right upward force on the head.....but think it through it does not hit the platter above.

Further what are internal forces in any moving HDD eg laptop

how do you move with required precision?

how do you not just blow the bearings?

thermal expansion how do you cope given the data read point are so small. the list goes on.

how it works at high speeds reliably most of the time is amazing

running at speeds and with a data density that defy reason.

>air or gas
HDD are vacuum sealed, only extremely high end Helium drives are NOT vacuum sealed.

ok...ic...so do the helium oones do this?

Bullshit, if they were, why would be repairing the arm at home possible at all?

yeah i thought this as well...

They are not vacuum sealed, they have filtered vent holes to equalize the pressure when they are running. If you look at a HDD, you'll find a label on it saying "don't block this hole".

I don't know if you are trying to confuse people or just a brainlet, but no, HDDs are not sealed. They actually have an activated carbon interface for pressure equalization.
Their operation in fact requires a very thin layer of air that keeps the head from touching the platter.

back to where you came from

not just this, but all this thing does is fuck with 1's and 0's. I don't understand how a device that does only that advanced so much it can run OS's, guide missles, fold simulated proteins, etc.. I can't think about it too much or I start to get the feeling that none of shit can actually work in reality and it's just devil tricks.

i think that's really cool how you hit the return key twice every time you shit out a broken sentence. keep it up.

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I still blows my mind that humans have made all of these complex machines with just materials that have been on Earth for millennia.

Trash

As your SSD is just a USB memory stick. The price tags and reliability prove it.

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You just start out with a few basic building blocks and find different ways to use them. Here's a little game that will walk you through the steps from basic logic gates to a simple CPU:

nandgame.com/

>nandgame.com/
bookmarked. thank you sir.

once you get 700mb net there is literally no reason to buy hard drives any more just use the cloud.

how do you encrypt files over the cloud

sealed does not mean vacuum

>lmao just give us all your data
>t. bezos

consider that heads fly at about 1/10th of a micron, which is 100 to 1000 smaller than the width of a human hair, while the platter rotates 60 times per second. it's amazing they're able to stay precisely at that height besides all the bumps from the hyperactive kid handling the laptop.
if you want your traditional drive to live, let it sit someplace.

youtube.com/watch?v=NGFhc8R_uO4
it's like magic at this stage. if the word went poof in a nuclear mushroom, it would probably take more than 50 years to rebuild the techniques from scratch. this is nanoscale lithography (do they still use that at that scale anymore?) and vapor deposition of the layers...

encrypt your cloud password with some high level shit if your concerned.

also i dont think they even care about pirated content

Does not matter. They are neither hermetically sealed nor under a vacuum.

As the head gets pushed closer to the platter, the air speed in that zone is higher, which in turn provides more lift to the head, compensating to an extent the initial force in the opposite direction.

That video is the best quick rundown on the state of the art of the semiconductor industry. Is not too out of date except I think they figured out how to do EUV photolitography.
It's fucking amazing, but it's not magic, just physics and very mature industrial processes.

Don't forget about tape drives. Cheaper data than HDD (I've seen $60 for 6TB), reliable, and extremely underappreciated.

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This, industry uses them for backups, I might look into getting them for backups too.

>$60 for 6TB
Yeah, the tapes. Drives are $3,000. And the reliability of those drive mechanisms...

t. we back up to LTO

What about second hand tape drives? Would they be any good or are they being gotten rid of for a good reason?

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I'd guess their just upgrading or switching to a different format. LTO, at least, is a reliable format, which is why businesses use it.

Maybe the newest ones can get that expensive, but older ones are quite cheaper. You can get a LTO-4 drive for just a few hundred dollars, and the data isn't too bad. 800GB / 1600GB compressed for $14 to $20.