Check out Priya Ganapati’s recent post on Wired’s Gadget Lab. Apparently, IBM researchers/ inventors have found yet another use for hard drives – studying and analyzing earthquakes in order to better predict when they might happen.
“Almost all hard drives have an accelerometer built into them, and all of that data is network-accessible,” says Bob Friedlander, master inventor at IBM. “If we can reach in, grab the data, clean it, network it and analyze it, we can provide very fine-grained pictures of what’s happening in an earthquake.”
The best drives for geological surveys – enterprise drives found in racks of servers and storage systems in data centers. The controlled and predictable environment enterprise drives live in apparently provides cleaner data for geologists versus using, for example, drives in laptop systems which are obviously mobile and thus vibration is more unpredictable and uncontrollable.
I can already see Seagate’s new datasheet for Savvio 10K
- Capacity: 600GB
- RPM: 10,000
- Interface: 6Gb/s SAS
- Earthquake Sensor: Yes
That Savvio drive might save more than just our data…
This is a brilliant idea. In terms of market application we need more accelerometer-equipped enterprise storage funding for cloud-hosted server databases in Southern California.
Expect a spike in demand about 3-4 years from now 😉