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.

Comments

Yup..

[appleprophet]

"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'? ;)

must be magic

[Tumbleweed]

I suppose this means that GMR technology is "sufficiently advanced."

Basic research to market in record time?!

[apsmith]

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...)