[citation][nom]caedenv[/nom]While this technology would be great for people like me who need sequential throughput, I fail to see how this would help the average person because it will still have the same seek time as other platter-based drives today. Remember, sequential throughput on a HDD is not all that bad (120-150MB/s); it is when things are not sequential that thing go to hell (30-60MB/s).Also, I find it hard to believe that it would take less power to heat a platter than to aim a small radio at it. Besides, would this not wear out the media having so many localized temperature variations? I mean, it is cool tech, but hard to believe it would work 'as advertised'.[/citation]
this tech applied to todays drive capacities allows for 10-20 times the current size. so you would be getting 40-80tb, as most people have no need for all that space, its conseveable that most people would never realisticly fill it. so the write speed would be a great improvement. and if read speed scaled with the increased size (not as much as write) we would have 1gb-2gb read speed (based on my current 1.5tb read speeds).
now if windows was installed in a way that would put a 100gb chunk in the beginning just for os and load a sequential read, the seek time would be more or less un needed, possibly makeing them faster/cheaper also than an ssd for that task...
hell if you figure people will never use all that hdd space, you could force programs to all write sequential, instead of now, where they know they cant write sequential all the time. the innital 15-30 what is it, ms seek time would be unimportant, considering you will have the choice of a 256gb ssd or a 40-80tb hdd that preform at about the same speed, but the hdd also allows mass storage. it would make a ssd a very hard sell.