What you're saying is obvious. Yes, of course, research, especially of the incremental kind results in innovations we see every day.
But there's a difference between the steady, ongoing improvements that follow from continued iteration and improvement and the whole "Groundbreaking, revolutionary technology that will change everything but is always decades away".
The fatigue doesn't come from the obvious incremental improvements, but those earth-shattering ones that always promise to be just around the corner but end up unattainable. From fusion reactors to flying cars, graphene-powered supercapacitors to 50%+ efficiency solar energy cells, and even, dare I say it, truly level 5 autonomous vehicles, these things are always just here, but fail to materialize.
No one is doubting the progress of technology. The problem is the science fiction-like promotion of technologies that fail to see any commercialization.
There is nothing incremental about many of these improvements.
Take say Helium filled HDD, that’s not simply an obvious outcome of taking 1960’s HDD technology and scaling things down. It’s very different technology that just happens to be in the same form factor so people assume it’s just all just tiny linear improvements.
But that's exactly the sort of incremental improvement I'm talking about. What exactly did adding Helium do to HDDs? we didn't invent a new kind of storage, we iterated and improved what we had already developed, and that iteration is itself incremental in nature. And the timing had to be right. If you were to go back to the 1980s and suggest adding Helium as a way to improve storage speed or capacity the industry would just have laughed at you because there were much more obvious ways to improve capacity and performance.
In fact, the necessity to use Helium in the first place is a result of all the steady, incremental improvements bringing us to a point where the use of helium could actually provide value.
A revolutionary, ground-breaking innovation would be to use Helium as the storage medium. An incremental innovation is to use helium to improve the storage approaches we're already using.
This is not at all the same sort of breathless hype as "graphene solves everything" but not a single commercial application that proves that it does. So, will ultra-high-density harddrives really be made with graphene in any scalable, commercializable way? Given all the other touted applications of graphene that have failed to materialize, unfortunately it seems that this is something that will need to be proven in a short amount of time (not 20 years) for those of us who have heard it all with regards to graphene to put any weight behind the claim in this article.
This article is literally about “graphene store ten times more data.” Your standpoint is it becomes a linear improvement if people get to 10x the storage by way of initially having 1.5x the storage capacity.
It’s not that helium or graphene alone instantly on their own get 10x improvements while everything else stays the same. Instead it’s about eventually hitting new limits but being at 10x capacity when that happens.
That's actually not what the article states. The close read on the article states that Graphene is used as a coating, which can function at higher temperatures so that when a different recording approach, Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR), is used, in laboratory conditions, the coating performs well. Graphene here is not being used as a storage medium. It is a coating medium, and even in this application cannot be applied until a different method for storing data (HAMR) is utilized. And even then, the claim of 10x improvement has to do with the potential of increasing storage density if HAMR is used, which can potentially be facilitated by graphene. But graphene in and of itself is not the reason for the 10x improvement.
The reasons why people are skeptical about graphene are many claims like this. Graphene has yet to show the ability to provide the benefits of the claims expressed in laboratory environments for many of the reasons other non-commercializable technology (such as flying cars) failed to materialize.
Maybe one day Graphene will live up to its claims, but the past almost 2 decades is showing that so far, it is good at generating sensational news, but not much else. Maybe we'll be wrong this time around. But it won't be graphene in this case that's the star of the show, it's HAMR. So, no the article, is not literally about "graphene stores ten times more data".
This is the sort of continuous problem with graphene. Graphene can enable something revolutionary if only this was also done, or if this approach works, or if this or if that.
I think you misunderstood. That’s why I said, “graphene alone instantly on their own.” You also don’t get a better HDD by taking a traditional HDD designed for normal air and running it in a helium environment.
But again, you’re sidestepping the point if in 20 years graphene is necessary for drives that are 10x current capacity and fit in existing enclosures by your definition it’s not revolutionary as long as the increased capacity showed up a little bit at a time and the transition point wasn’t obvious.
But there's a difference between the steady, ongoing improvements that follow from continued iteration and improvement and the whole "Groundbreaking, revolutionary technology that will change everything but is always decades away".
The fatigue doesn't come from the obvious incremental improvements, but those earth-shattering ones that always promise to be just around the corner but end up unattainable. From fusion reactors to flying cars, graphene-powered supercapacitors to 50%+ efficiency solar energy cells, and even, dare I say it, truly level 5 autonomous vehicles, these things are always just here, but fail to materialize.
No one is doubting the progress of technology. The problem is the science fiction-like promotion of technologies that fail to see any commercialization.