Take a look at the Hard Rectangular Drive by DataSlide for an innovative approach to storage. Instead of a round, roating platter, the Hard Rectangular Drive has two plates (each containing 64 read/write heads) suspended above and below a flat, rectangular recording surface which moves backwards and forwards.


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DataSlide has drawn from LCD, HDD, and semiconductor standards based mature manufacturing process technologies to invent a truly revolutionary new high performance storage technology: the innovative Hard Rectangular Drive™ (HRD™). The HRD employs DataSlide’s patented Massively Parallel 2-D Array storage technology to achieve 160,000 IOPS and 500MB/sec transfer rates while reading from and writing to magnetic media. The HRD’s highly efficient piezoelectric actuator system oscillates rectangular media along one axis between a fixed array of millions of read/write heads on a single substrate of low expansion glass. In the first generation, any 64 of these heads may be active in reads and writes at the same time. Total power consumption for the HRD? Less than 4 Watts. That’s 1/3 the power of a 15,000 RPM hard disk drive and 1/2 the power consumed by a typical Solid State Drive. The Hard Rectangular Drive will serve as a key building block for the high performance, low carbon footprint datacenter of the future.

Ya, looks awesome.  I'm not sure how well it will last with the heads in contact with the platters.  I'm also concerned about price with the number of heads and the diamond plating they mention.  But if they pull it off, it looks like a cross between platter and SSD that will be ultimately better than both.