Some thoughts on Improvizing the Hard Drive Design

By far we have seen that using a hard disk for storage is bound to dome, one day or the other. A sudden power crash or a power surge can damage your hard disk. Reason, there are mechanical parts which rest or land on the sensitive magnetic media when something like this happens.

I happen to lose three hard disks (all due to power fluctuations) and that too in a span of around ten years [PS: I also lost another hard disk full of data, due to human error but the hard disk was fine]. That too after a lot of precautions, because I am a little bit of paranoid of such stuff. I make sure everything gets its worth. But that too cannot stop the hard disks on crashing and giving up on me. Why ??

Recently I thought, why not keep a small battery just to part the heads when there is a sudden power surge or power down. This would make the hard disks almost fool proof and highly reliable. It is not that this is going to stop people replacing their hard disk. Because, eventhough I lost two hard disks I upgraded them twice too, because of need for more space. If possible, I would be having all my hard disks at this time with my system, if I had more power capacity on my SMPS. But the fact that the hard disks have crashed have made it difficult to do so.

I believe the above should be a very minimal work and that would make the hard disks live more and be more reliable for their users. We at India, due to frequent power cuts/surges, know that we have to have a UPS(power backup), but I heard from some of my friends that a power backup at US is not even heard off.

One more idea I had in mind is a type of hybrid hard disks just similar to hybrid cars. This is a little bit more complicated as this involves the latest solid state devices (SSD) hard drives to the magnetic media. Now, magnetic media is cheap to make it more acceptable in the market. But the SSDs are faster and mainly don't have a moving parts, hence are not easily prone to the power down problems. But the price of a SSD is near triple the amount of normal Disc Drive that too at a lower capacity.

Can we combine the advantages of the both and provide a hybrid hard drive (both the magnetic media and the SSD) in the same drive. One holds the hot data as cache for faster processing and the other has a permanent storage. This will boost the computer performance without drastically affecting the packet. This type of device should be a tremendous hit based on the hard disk drives getting sold nowadays. With much less latency period and efficient storage capacity (price per GB), these devices will be ideal for the recent multi-core processors hitting the market.

I believe if the both of the above ideas get implemented, they should be smash hits. But, now who will do this ??