Magnifying Visors

What is the point of fiber optics on a hard disk drive?

Really, what is the point, there is no real distance that the data has to travel, from the motherboard to the CPU, and this has to all be converted into light, and then back from light, thus creating overhead I want to know what reasons make this a good decision 20 years and cant explain your answers?

Public Comments

1. There's no point now, but it can accelerate linear transfer speeds if you need to pull an assload of data off a harddrive, such as a caching server..
2. The fiber optics actually accelerate the transfer speed thus improving system performance and making your life a little easier.
3. Current desk top storage media would completely waste this, as data access is so much slower. These are used in big hardware such as mainframes or SANs where you may be moving petabytes in single operations. Fiber has been in use in the telephone system for about 25 years locally as it enabled higher volumes through smaller cables with little to no interference. Gophers were a problem initially, until the frequencies were tuned.