A slide presentation entitled “The Superb Hard Disk Drive: Zooming in on data storage” has been given several times over the last couple of years. It is great fun to give the talk and it always seems to be well received by the audience. The experience of putting the talk together and researching the background for some of the slides was actually very enjoyable. Continuing along these lines, the intention for this site is to gradually transform the talk into a book with one full chapter corresponding to each slide in the presentation (and each factor of ten in scale). I’m getting a lot of encouragement and help in this endeavor. In particular, Wen Jiang was the one who first put the idea into my head and helped write part of the chapter on Voyager. Mike Salo and Roger Brown have been giving me valuable feedback. Whether the project ever reaches a conclusion is an open question, but drafts for several of the early chapters have been written and are being assembled here.
This site is public site and any feedback or comments are welcome and encouraged 🙂
Cover Blurb:
“Get ready for a wild ride starting with the vast distances of outer space and ending with the tiny distances that separate atoms. For a very different perspective on data storage, each chapter of the book looks at things on a scale that is a factor of ten smaller than the previous chapter. The common thread is the technology of information storage. Information storage is what defines human history and it is the machine-readable data storage developed in the last half-century that provides the foundation of the modern information age. More than anything, data storage implies magnetic recording and the hard disk drive. The humble Hard Disk Drive contains such exquisite technologies and operates at such astounding precision that it almost defies belief. Yet, our industry churns out these devices by the hundreds of millions and sells them for a few tens of dollars each. Please enjoy this light-hearted logarithmic romp through storage technology from interstellar space to interatomic spacings.“