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.

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...and then IBM went bad

[freebsd guy]

I used to be an engineer at Maxtor. Though my job was entirely on the software end (maintaining Max-Blast, the drive fitness tester, and other assorted hack jobs), I had several friends who designed and tested drive hardware, and we sat down a few months back to talk about the 75GXP problems. As it turns out, those issues are closely related to the implementation of the GMR head.

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