MAMR Breakthrough for Next-Gen HDDs
Mechanical storage is only efficient for bulk storage because NAND chips are still being price-fixed just like LCD panels and RAM chips before that.  It&#x27;s no accident it&#x27;s the same manufacturers involved either.  And just like those other products eventually saw a large international investigation culminating in &quot;punishments&quot; for global price-fixing, so will NAND.  And when that happens, the fact hard drives have material costs that radically outstrip basic NAND chips (which are about as dead-simple as it gets) will very rapidly result in NAND storage offering tens or hundreds of times as much capacity for the same price.  It&#x27;s absurd the mechanical charade is being allowed to be perpetuated as long as it has been.<p>You can&#x27;t make devices that deal with motors and rare earth magnets and spinning platters coated with ruthenium and other rare materials at insanely exacting tolerances, encapsulated in hermetically sealed Helium bubbles for cheaper than you can photolithographically lay out a bunch of NAND gates in cheap bulk semiconductors.  There really isn&#x27;t any word for it other than absurd.  And the fact that NAND chips are in literally EVERYTHING means they are commoditized.  Which means economies of scale make them cost almost nothing to manufacture.  And yet... it still costs you 4x or more to get an SSD rather than several pounds of spinning metal?  Nah, that&#x27;s not how things work without help.<p>Why stop with microwaves?  Why not make platters out of pure gold and the read&#x2F;write heads out of synthetic diamond?  Maybe integrate a cryogenic cooling system and store the data in a Bose-Einstein condensate?  At this point it seems people will believe even that is cheaper than some NAND chips run off a line like printouts.