Despite solid state drives increasing in capacity in recent years, the humble platter-based 3.5-inch hard drive still reigns supreme as the data storage device to beat in terms of bits for your buck. But if traditional drives are going to meet user’s ever-increasing data storage demands they will need to improve on the maximum 620 gigabits per square inch storage densities currently possible in platter based 3.5-inch drives. That’s just what Seagate has demonstrated with new technology that has achieved a milestone storage density of 1 terabit per square inch.

From the advent of hard drives in 1956, the magnetic surface of the hard drive platters was divided in sub-micrometer-sized regions called magnetic domains that were oriented horizontally and parallel to the disk surface in what was called longitudinal recording. But around 2005/2006, Perpendicular Magnetic Recording (PMR) was introduced, which changed the orientation to perpendicular to allow for closer magnetic domain spacing and increase data storage capacity.

Seagate has now demonstrated a next-generation recording technology called heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) that increases each platter’s storage capacity by shrinking a platter’s data bits and also tightening the concentric circles, known as data tracks, on the disk’s surface that anchor the bits.

Shrinking the data bits much further isn’t possible in current hard disk technologies because the magnetization of sufficiently small nanoparticles can randomly flip direction under the influence of temperature in what is known as superparamagnetism. HAMR technology gets around this by using materials that are stable at much smaller sizes, but which require heating with a laser before the magnetic orientation of a bit can be changed.

At the current limit of around 620 gigabits per square inch, the maximum storage capacity of today’s 3.5-inch HDDs is 3 TB, while 2.5-inch HDDs with a storage densities of around 500 gigabits per square inch top out at 750 GB. By using HAMR technology, Seagate says it has achieved a linear bit density of roughly two million bits per inch, and a data density of just over one trillion bits (1 terabit) per square inch.

Seagate anticipates that the first generation of HAMR drives will more than double the current capacities to 6 TB for 3.5-inch drives and 2 TB for 2.5-inch drives. However, with the technology offering a theoretical area density limit of somewhere from five to ten terabits per square inch, it says that 30 TB to 60 TB 3.5-inch drives and 10 TB to 20 TB 2.5-inch drives are possible in the future.

Seagate says its first HAMR hard drives will be introduced later this decade, with drives offering up to 60 TB likely to appear in the following ten years.

Source: Seagate

5/21/2012 11:10:12 PM

this is your greatest thread yet.

5/21/2012 11:28:01 PM

It would be better with a source link

5/22/2012 12:19:37 AM

Quote :

"Seagate"

PASS

j/k...i remember the days when they didn't suck

seriously, though, SSD is so stupid expensive per gig...i'd be happy to ignore them altogether and move on to the next generation of "traditional" storage so that the ONLY purpose of SSD will be for portable computers

5/22/2012 7:25:22 AM

if standard hds mad a huge jump in capacity, ssd s would be rendered nearly useless.

5/22/2012 9:20:23 AM

I'm not sure I follow. I'd still be compelled to put my OS any any application with excessive HD access on a much faster SSD, even if I had a 60TB drive.

5/22/2012 9:27:29 AM

my mistake...i heard about the HAMR stuff a couple of months ago and was combining that with another article i had read about using lasers on drives to significantly increase their data access times...i'm not sure if the HAMR thing is a combination (and therefore offers a faster drive in addition to a higher data density), but i thought they were faster

EDIT: this isn't the one i was looking for, but it's the same basic thing: http://www.infoworld.com/t/storage/lasers-could-make-disk-drives-hundred-times-faster-060

Quote :

"Researchers have demonstrated disk write speeds one hundred times faster than current hard drives. The method uses a laser to heat the recording surface and alter its magnetic field. There is no equivalent read speed increase though. According to a report in Science Now, Dutch scientists at Radboud University Nijmegen used a laser to send flashes of polarized light to a 5-micron-wide spot on a disk surface which was heated. The sheer angular momentum of the photons hitting the recording surface was then able to flip the magnetic field if the light was polarized one way, but left it unaltered if polarized in the other direction. A traditional magnetic field reader was then able to detect binary ones or zeroes accordingly. This shows the promise of heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR). The laser flash duration was 40 femtoseconds -- 40 billionths of a millionth of a second -- which is 100 times shorter than the time needed for a current write head to change the magnetic field direction on a hard drive disk recording bit. Thus there is the promise of increasing data writing speed up to one hundred times. This will enable hard disk data writing speed to better keep up with ever-faster data transfers across networks. However there are problems to be resolved. Firstly the recording area, at 5-microns wide, is very much bigger than the sub-half micron area in today's hard drives. Drive users won't accept a substantial decrease in areal density, meaning lower disk capacity, as the price of a substantial speed increase. However, the researchers expect to get it down to a 10 nanometer area. A second problem is that the read component of the disk head remains magnetic and there is, as yet, no technology promising a hundredfold increase in read speed. Physicist Julius Hohlfeld of the Seagate Research establishment in Pittsburgh says that a third problem is the need to have an affordable laser that can fire 40 femtosecond pulses. Daniel Stanciu, co-author of the research paper, expects a working prototype within ten years, which means that a commercial product could be 13 to 15 years away. That would take us to 2019 or thereabouts. Seagate has suggested that HAMR could increase area density to 50Tbit/sq inch by 2019, meaning a 40-50TB 2.5-inch hard drive would be theoretically possible."

[Edited on May 22, 2012 at 9:46 AM. Reason : link and quote]

5/22/2012 9:42:22 AM