Long gone the history of having microprocessor, memory or graphics card as the bottlenecks of PC performance. It is now the hard drive, the only mechanical device left inside a PC. The traditional way of improving a hard drive includes making the disks rotate faster, increasing storage density per platter as well as putting a much large buffer for cache miss.
As software gets larger in size such improvements are marginal at best. The room for improvements is bounded by the physical characteristic of mechanical drive. Hard drive makers have to look beyond mechanical and jump to electronics drive.
With the proliferation of USB thumb drive, the NAND flash memory drops price quick enough to make it worthwhile to build a flash hard drives (essentially a bigger thumb drives in tens of gigabytes). SanDisk is going to unveil a 32 GB, 1.8-inch solid-state drive (SSD) as an alternative to the magnetic hard disk on next week’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas.
The race for micro fuel cells that power devices is heating up. Several companies are anxiously working on developing and marketing micro fuel cells for portable devices. The most recent announcement by Samsung after Christmas allows you to run a laptop for a whole month, assuming it runs for eight hours a day.
The following is a list of fuel cell research published in the past 5 years.
- Wired News, 2002: A startup from Munich, SFC, has developed a micro fuel cell that runs on methanol or Direct Methanol Fuel Cells (DMFC).
- BBC News, 2003: NEC has unveiled a laptop computer that has a built-in fuel cell powered by 300 cubic centimeters of methanol, uses a catalyst to break this down into oxygen and hydrogen and generates heat and power as by-products.