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The Story Of GMR Heads
lopati writes "The story of GMR heads, "the breakthrough that boosted the capacity of hard-drives from a few gigabytes to 100 gigabytes and more--came from chance observation, basic research and a vast, painstaking search for the right materials." Check out the helpful infographic." Background: This is a story, essentially, about how hard drives broke through some of the space limitations at the beginning of the 1990s - pretty cool background.
My dad still makes the mistake of refering to hard drive size in megabytes, because that's what he started with...
Makes me wonder how long it will be before we have commercially available (~$200-$300) terabyte drives... And how long it will be before we have apps that require them...
I like you, Stuart. You're not like everyone else, here, at Slashdot.
More space makes happy geeks but ofcouse to a certain point. Do you really need over 100gb on a desktop. I Have a pretty good sized collection of mp3s but my 40gb hd isn't even near full.
Carpe meam simiam!
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Research really needs to be poured into the development of long-term solid-state storage. Even with GMR heads and modern EPRML magnetic encoding techniques, we are rapidly approaching the limitations of the magnetic medium. New technologies seek to enhance drive speed and capacity at the sake of reliability; I have had four 7200-rpm 100 GB drives fail on me within a year of their purchase. I have had no such trouble with older drives. With RAM and other solid-state getting progressively cheaper and being at absurdly low prices already, it seems foolish to still be reliant on fault-prone mechanical platters for long-term storage.
"The problem with the French is that they don't have a word for 'entrepeneur'." -George W. Bush
Hell, doesn't everybody have at least 100 gigs of DivX?
Also, we're seeing more people using their computers as Digital Video Recorders. You can never have too much HD space for that.
Hey dude, I'm 25 and I remember my first PC having a 32MB hard disk.. I cant be THAT old?!?
;-)
Darn stickin' teen punks
The data you consume just gets larger and at the same time your tidying up gets slacker. Sooner than you believed possible you are out of space. You may think that we've reached a limit where you can have more space than you could possibly ever need, but time will prove you wrong :-)
IBM's major problem was that, although they were able to scale down the GMR head very easily, they had large stocks of old media that was not certified for use on GMR drives. (Incidentally, most of that media is in an enormous warehouse in Hungary, which is where most of their drives are produced now.) They designed a recertification process that was supposed to allow them to separate the media that would be suitable for the 75GXPs from the media that wasn't suitable, but that process was deeply flawed and this resulted in the high failure rates of their drives.
You may find it a bit odd to be hearing this from a former Maxtor employee. Well, the dirty little secret of storage companies is that reverse engineering is rampant. My colleagues at Maxtor probed, disassembled, and tested the IBM drives; indeed, they might have known what the bug was even before IBM did.
So, the obvious RISK of GMR technology is: do not use platters that are not certified for use with the new heads. Those who disregard this creed are certain to meet with a nasty public relations disaster in due time.
freebsd guy
..Of course 640k should be enough for anyone..
This always comes up in discussons about huge hard-drives. I've got a couple of hundred gigs on my desktop, and I'm currently going through and trying to clean the thing up to make some free space. Granted there is a lot of junk there, but I actually need the space for working with video files - I do graphic design and video editing and I can tell you that 100gb sounds great, but can fill up fairly fast when your working with uncompressed files.
air and light and time and space
My local Fry's had an ad in the paper today for a Seagate 80 GB drive for only $119. While this is still more expensive (in $/MB) than other media types, the relative prices are decreasing significantly. Soon an affordable 1 TB of storage won't be just a dream for the average geek!
The future isn't what it used to be.
"the breakthrough that boosted the capacity of hard-drives from a few gigabytes to 100 gigabytes and more--came from chance observation, basic research and a vast, painstaking search for the right materials."
;)
In summary, the guys at IBM ran out of HD space for their um, 'special files'?
So... How long 'til we hit a few yottabytes?
Remember, there were no nuclear weapons before women were allowed to vote.
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Er... Sorry, that's $129 after the rebate. I think you can buy from fry's online at outpost.com (but why would you do that when you can go to the store and enjoy the pleasant holiday experience?)
The future isn't what it used to be.
Back in 1988 when I worked in an IBM mainframe shop, I had the good fortune to run accross one of their "technical newsletters", a publication of data from basic research efforts in various IBM labs around the world.
It's since been my "case in point" in any argument that there is no market for "basic research" and therefore government, taxes, theft, must be used in order to better the human condition.
Fulton, Bell, Edison, Tesla, and a host of for-profit universities all doing basic research not withstanding, some people just love using guns to force others to support their theory of "good".
IBM didn't keep their basic research secret then, and even with something as impossibly profitable as keeping GMR secret now might have been, the article notes that the highest density drive on the market isn't even made by IBM. They're not keeping it secret now, either.
Bravo.
Bob-
The Ludwig von Mises Institute. The reasoning individuals economics
What's really scary is thinking back to circa 1983 when external hard drives for some of the first PC's were in the 5 megabyte range, and those cost $4,000 to $5,000. Only for those that could afford such luxuries, or could justify a serious business need for such devices.
5 megabytes. $5,000.00. That just makes my head hurt now. Each single one of my self-ripped MP3's comes in at more space than that!
And then it occurred to me on this trip down memory lane that the real danger in the science (fiction for now) of time travel is getting ourselves killed by taking our relatively awe-striking hardware back in time and gloating to our younger selves.
"...painstaking search for the right materials."
Sounds like the light bulb.
One of my physics profs, Yumi Ijiri, moved to my school after doing a few years of research for NIST and IBM regarding GMR technology. Basically, noone could figure out why GMR worked, or how to systematically improve upon the concept. IBM found a neat combination of thin films created these extremely sensitive magnetic sectors, and instead of finding out why/how it works, they empirically tried some 22000 or so combinations until they progressively found better and better arrangements. After the fact, they hired Yumi to figure all the physics out, but her research was also inconclusive. It kinda scares me that there's stuff in my harddrive that IBM and NIST couldn't figure out after 4 years of research.
This is where I get my recommended daily allowance of "Foot in Mouth."
I suppose this means that GMR technology is "sufficiently advanced."
This is kind of offtopic, but interesting nonetheless. The economist provides that nice little Flash infographic as part of the story, served off their own URL, and it's actually impressively done.
But get to the final step, and you'll see that "this translates into very large capacity hard drives that can be made cheaper and more reliable for our IBM customers." It's marketing fluff for IBM!
It looks like The Economist was happy to be given this material, since it probably looked so snazzy. But I think at best they'll be embarrassed by their lack of (online) journalistic savvy, and at worst it's the start of a new world of checkbook journalism.
No such luck
certain operating systems will likely beat you to the punch
;)
Actually thinking of software generated by genetic programming, etc. which produces code that obviously never passed through human fingers.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
And no doubt those evil bastards at IBM dared to patent some of the ideas. It's so obvious after all! Hard drives have been made for years! Putting more space in a hard drive is a novel idea? What the hell?
I remember first reading about these in some physics articles in about 1991 or 1992; we had a presentation from one of our colleagues on the underlying physics about then. The commercial companies really jumped on it to bring these out so quickly! The only other case I can recall of such quick and major deployment of a basic discovery was when the Erbium-doped fiber amplifiers came out, within a year or so of the discovery of Erbium's ability to amplify optical signals; this is why we can double capacity on optical fibers with ease now, even trans-oceanic cables, just by changing the equipment on the ends, and is one of the major reasons for the rapid increases in bandwidth capacity of the last few years (getting the telco's to actually release that bandwidth for a reasonable price is another story of course...)
Energy: time to change the picture.
Here's a link to one of my posts on the Spintronics slashdot article a few weeks ago. I think I posted it a few hours too late for most people (moderators included) to notice it.
Explains basics of GMR, which is based on magnetoelectronics, or it's catchier nickname Spintronics. Also related to GMR are the non-volatile RAM's commercially available now.
Cool part is that GMR devices were commercially available only a few years after discovery in the lab. That's an accomplishment usually reserved for potentially ground-breaking devices (ie, transistors). T'will be very interesting to see how this field progresses in the future.
make world, not war
Talking about how much modern HD's can hold. . .
The present record holder, a pocket-sized 120 gigabyte hard-drive from
Western Digital, can store the equivalent of a stack of double-spaced
typewritten pages taller than an 18-storey building.
Assume that one story is 10 feet
Assume that 300 pages stack 1" high.
Assume 250 words per typewritten page.
120,000,000,000 / (18 * 10 * 12 * 300 * 250) = ~740 bytes per word!
If an word averages 6 characters, then they are using over 100 bytes to
represent each word!
With all this great technology, I wonder why these larger capacties are only available on IDE drives.
It seems to me, SCSI drive capacities used to outstrip IDE by quite a bit, and the price penalty wasn't all that much (~$200). Lately, all I see in the catalogs for SCSI is 18GB or 36GB, while IDE is at 80GB, 120GB, and even 160GB.
Is there something about this technology that isn't compatible with SCSI, or does SCSI not scale well, or what?
In the USA, we like stuff watered down, like beer, television, and freedom.
the IBM team set about examining elements drawn from practically the whole of the periodic table. All told, the group made and tested no fewer than 30,000 multi-layer combinations of elements. The periodic table has about 100 elements (that last for more than a second). I don't much about this stuff but isn't the periodic table made so that you don't have to examine each and every element? You can sort of predict across 'rows' and 'columns'? Also, how can you make 30,000 combinations out of multi-layers of 100 elements? Hmm, wonder if they tried Sodium Chloride as one of the combinations? There can't be 30,000 valid combinations in solid state physics that satisfy the criterion needed for GMR heads! ... so, the team made an absolutely crucial discovery. They found that varying the thickness of the spacer layer actually affected the behaviour of the magnetic layers.
I would think that would be obvious. I mean after 30,000 test, they find that thickness matters?
ehh where are u solid state? come on, chop chop
.5 secs... so what have they accomplished??? higher risk for more data i guess...
lately HD's became large, quiet, umm still have 2MB cache... for over 2~3 years
but once u bump u are still screwed
oh yeah ata-133 is at like what 42~50MB/sec max so what does 133 does besides emptying a buffer is like
Dont Judge The situation by the Misfortunate. Goga.
My family's been in MR tech (well, magnetic storage) for over 30 years now. I worked 3 years in IBM's MR head manufacturing facility in San Jose (Cottle Rd.). It used to be that the substrate people (the ones who made the actual disks) didn't have much to do because the MR heads could not write small enough to pressure them.
GMR heads caused quite the stir because they could write smaller than the substrate had resolution.
Now IBM's "pixie dust" has swung the pendulum the other way, as the head is once again the bottleneck.
An interesting tid-bit is how many production managers were hired away from IBM soon after GMR heads were released.
I'd rather have someone respond than be modded up.
That surprises you? That is the reason guns were invented, and it is their primary purpose. The government has always had and is always going to have more and better guns than you. That's why they collect taxes and you don't.
Anyway, if IBM and other private research institutions didn't already have a cozy relationship with the government, they'd use their large budgets to buy their own guns and collect taxes from you themselves.
As E.S.Raymond mentioned, firearms are just one form of last resort in individual defense, and therefore don't have to be the latest and greatest. The government has tanks and laser guided bombs, anyway.
To paraphrase, "The gun, the picket line, the lawsuit. Each are the last resort. No one wants to go on strike, sue someone, or shoot an attacker, but real problems are happening when there is effort to take those options away."
Bob-
The Ludwig von Mises Institute. The reasoning individuals economics
In case the person that wrote this hasn't noticed,
most research is funded by big companies betting
on future products - that is why we are where we
are today and that is why there will be an even
brighter technological future tomorrow.
Penguin Kicka!
By archiving reality.
Why should the data you store by limited to "properly" published materials? I currently have on my 2 GB hard drive every single email I've received or sent since 1998 (about 6,000), and it's my electronic memory. And it hardly makes a dent in the drive space.
So take all those cameras you bought (as instructed by the wonderful popup X10 ads :) and send the live video to be archived onto your hard drive. Months from now you can go look at any feed. So it's just like my email archive, only scaled up by a factor of 10^6 -- from 100 kB of emails a day to 100 GB of video per day (1 Mbps per camera, 10 cameras).
Still not enough? Consider the fact that video is just a tiny fraction of what you perceive as reality itself. Go for insane resolution, 360-degree field of view (or even better, 4-pi steradians :) , 5.1 surround sound, the other three senses, sixth and seventh senses ...
Now you've archived your own perceived reality (of your own space), how about experiencing someone else's? Think movies, incuding porn :)
Every advance is storage capacity is immediately filled by increased appetite for storage.
What is the bitrate of reality?
One simple rule for its versus it's
i really like the flash animations here, actually - nice job. but my question is why are the animations coming from the economist site?
I highly doubt they are trying to use media left over from pre-GMR days...May as well be a century in disk drive years... Maybe they were having screening issues, but it has nothing to do with GMR heads!!
seibed
You young pups. My dad had a slide rule, and my mother programmed with punch cards.
:-)
For that matter, so did I until I discovered the campus time sharing system (supposedly for grad students and faculty only) and hacked myself an account on it... Of course that spoiled me on the microcomputers then becoming available (Kim-I, Altair etc) because my personal computer (well, in a way) was a Burroughs B6700. (Hey, I had the Burroughs MCP equivalent of root, I owned it
Just so this isn't totally off-topic, the 100-GB drives are a lifesaver. A few months ago I installed some systems that are running three (3) 75GB drives apiece just for data (video) storage. That's only about 15 hours of DV total. The limit now is tiny little 32-bit filesystems limiting you to 2GB (or 4GB) per file.
-- Alastair
This whole article seems to come from inside IBM.
While I am prepared to believe that the company are behind GMR (I remember the original announcement), it seems a bit implausible that they invented all other forms of magnetic mass storage as well - something that this article implies.
Remington Rand bought up the ENIAC in the early 1960s and tried to make a commercial proposition of it. They must have used some form of mass storage apart from 12" floppies.
This sounds a bit like Al Gore inventing the Internet (which he apparently never actually claimed anyway).
Mielipiteet omiani - Opinions personal, facts suspect.
I had a summer job in '83 selling hard drives & other computer stuff by mail order - they were a bit cheaper than you remember. Retail for an 11 MB drive was $1400. (Of course, we were the cheapest game in town. ;) It was an external device a little smaller than a shoebox. Had one on my Osborne 1; it felt like a bottomless pit into which you could pour data without ever filling it up. Top-of-the-line was the 44 MB model, at a little more than $3000.
Obviously the writer has no understanding of the subject matter.
It is written so that it seems like it may be informative, but for anyone with a brain it is clear that it is a mish-mash of facts that when put together make little sense.
This is the worst kind of obfuscation, but calling it obfuscation implies the writer knows what he/she is talking about, and this I doubt.
Thankfully, the slashdot crowd can make up for this sorry lakuna of an article, with several coherent (not this one!) comments, that actually make me think.
Now, how do we tap into this wealth of knowledge and experience without having to read crap economist no-brain articles like this?
I remember something called the "Buckingham Pi theorem" but never fully understood it : )
Supposedly it can be used to fully characterize the solution space without having to try all those billions of combinations of different alloys and thicknesses.
Would it apply in this situation? Does anyone have a link that explains how it works?
That that is is that that that that is not is not.