A new storage technology
Very interesting...
From
ExtremeTech comes this story about a new technology being developed at Fujitsu:
Fujitsu Stakes Future of Hard Drive on HAMR
On Tuesday, hard drive and peripheral maker Fujitsu announced it had developed a multi-layer optical element for a new storage technology known as heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR).
Considered by many to be the future of hard drive storage, HAMR is a technology that magnetically records data on high-stability media using laser thermal assistance—or, as it's also commonly known: heat. Many believe this technology will significantly extend the capacity of modern magnetic disc drives, eventually allowing more and more bits of information to be crammed into them.
As Joel Hagberg, vice president of marketing and business development for Fujitsu points out, because heating and cooling is paramount to HAMR, Fujitsu successfully developed highly efficient optical elements that can be incorporated into the hard disk drive during the manufacturing process.
"From an advanced development standpoint, Fujitsu has worked on a lot of technologies," said Hagberg.
"There are a lot of enabling technologies that are going to be required if storage capacities are to continue at their current rate. An efficient optical heating element is one of those."
Theoretically, HAMR allows for storage of up to 50 terabits per square inch, an unthinkable level by today's standards. To put that number into perspective, a person could store the entire printed contents of the Library of Congress on a single disc drive in their notebook computer with that capacity.
But for today's perpendicular drives, the Holy Grail for storage remains around the 1 terabit per square inch level. And this is where HAMR becomes quite useful. If the storage density—the number of data bits stored on a given disc surface—continues to grow at its current rate, within the next five-to-ten years the data bits will become so small that they may become magnetically unstable due to a phenomenon known as superparamagnetism—a big word that basically describes the adverse effects of magnetic flux on data bits.
As many see it, the solution is to use a more stable medium, but unfortunately modern magnetic heads are unable to write data on such media.
According to Hagberg, HAMR solves this problem by heating the medium with a laser-generated beam at the precise spot where data bits are being recorded. When heated, the medium becomes easier to write, and the rapid subsequent cooling stabilizes the written data. The result of this heat-assisted recording is a dramatic increase in the recorded density that can be achieved.
Tuesday's announcement places Fujitsu—a company that spends 2.5 billion dollars per year on R&D—with other storage-focused companies (including Seagate), all of whom are experimenting with what they refer to as "enabling technologies" for HAMR.
Very cool -- I do a lot of photography and disk space is always an issue. I can see setting up a nice RAID array of these on a Linux box as a household server.
Posted by DaveH at November 29, 2006 9:17 PM