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From: chuck@amdahl.amdahl.com (Charles Simmons)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: how fast could disks be (Mach 1)
Message-ID: <12357@amdahl.amdahl.com>
Date: Mon, 17-Aug-87 13:01:05 EDT
Article-I.D.: amdahl.12357
Posted: Mon Aug 17 13:01:05 1987
Date-Received: Tue, 18-Aug-87 05:29:39 EDT
References: <lots> <12191@amdahl.amdahl.com> <1189@k.gp.cs.cmu.edu> <1075@vlsi.cs.cmu.edu>
Reply-To: chuck@amdahl.amdahl.com (Charles Simmons)
Organization: Amdahl Corp, Sunnyvale CA
Lines: 31
Keywords: laser disk scan Mach

In article <1075@vlsi.cs.cmu.edu> gwu@vlsi.cs.cmu.edu (George Wu) writes:
>
>     There's been all this talk about gaining faster mass storage with
>parallel operations, and more recently, optical disks. But it seems to me that
>a limiting factor are the mechanical parts, which must physically move. Even
>using a scanning laser beam to read optical disks, a mirror must be
>manipulated, unless someone has found a way to bend light. Relativity anybody?
>
>     But what about non-mechanical storage systems? Are there feasible
>magnetic and/or solid state systems out there? I remember there used to be a
>big hoopla about bubble memory, but I haven't heard anything recently. And I'm
>not sure why, but intuitively, I feel that solid state devices would be even
>faster than magnetic ones. Is this just a bias left over from magnetic tapes
>and drives?
>
>							George

How about an optical disk with a laser driven by a phased array (as
in phased array radar)?
(Is there such a thing as a phased array laser?)  Or maybe some other
storage medium accessed by a phased array?  Such a creature would have
no moving parts.

A few months ago, Byte magazine had an article on a British company
that was working on wafer scale integration.  There first product
was supposed to be a 7 Megabyte solid-state "disk drive".  Access to
this memory would be serial, but seek and transfer times were on the
order of 1000 times faster than seek and transfer times on vanilla
disks.

-- Chuck