HD : BBC4 to recreate the first night of television.

[RichardCoulter]

Originally Posted by Hugh

A hard drive has moving parts - a HDD uses magnetism to store data on a rotating platter, and the read/write head floats above the spinning platter reading and writing data.

If it didn't have moving parts, it wouldn't work.

Unless, of course, it's a SSD (Solid State Drive)...

Will laser drives still need moving parts?

Not heard of these until Horizon mentioned them in another thread:

Originally Posted by Horizon

Choice.

I only have the choice of watching something if its on my hard drives, I don't have that choice if I don't have large drives.

Netflix, Now TV etc are all good except when you want to watch a tv episode and find that that episode or even the entire season of a series has been removed.

Roll on laser drives and over the next decade 100TB drives.

Do you mean laser disc?

If so, yes, as something needs to turn the laser disc round.....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaserDisc

[heero_yuy]

Originally Posted by Hugh

Do you mean laser disc?

If so, yes, as something needs to turn the laser disc round.....

And the laser LED and photo detector itself is in a moving mount with a voice coil to enable it to track the movements of the "groove" on the disk.

It seems to me that with the rapid increase in the size and compactness of solid state storage devices that these will become pre-eminent in the future and displace all optical mechanical systems such as Blu_ray and DVD.

[RichardCoulter]

Thanks, so it seems that moving parts are here to stay for the foreseeable future.

As these are more prone to break down, you'd think that someone would have invented something that doesn't move by now!

[spiderplant]

Originally Posted by heero_yuy

It seems to me that with the rapid increase in the size and compactness of solid state storage devices that these will become pre-eminent in the future and displace all optical mechanical systems such as Blu_ray and DVD.

I remember in the early 1990s someone prominent in the computer industry predicting that hard discs would be replaced by battery-backed RAM by the end of the decade, as at that time RAM prices per byte were dropping much more quickly than discs. But a couple of years later the HDD manufacturers really got their act together and they have never looked back.

Originally Posted by RichardCoulter

As these are more prone to break down, you'd think that someone would have invented something that doesn't move by now!

They have, but not for the same price.

[RichardCoulter]

Ahhh right, if they're expensive, it's probably more cost effective for VM to repair/replace boxes as needed then.