A Terabyte of Data on a Laptop Hard Drive

KaosConMan writes: "TechnologyReview.com has an article describing a new technique being developed by General Electric and IBM to further decrease the size needed to magnetically store data. This new technique could produce 150 gigabits per square centimeter-- that's ~57,000 songs on an iPod or a terabyte on a laptop size hard drive!"

Comments

Posted previously.

[Wohali]

Double-check what you've posted already, guys, please...

Further Reading

[Overcoat]

An slightly longer article on patterned media was published in Technology Research News back in February 2001. The article goes into more detail about how the technology works and about some of the problems associated with development of it. Linkeroo

Re:cool. I mean, hot

[jonelf]

I don't see why a hd would heat more just because it's stores more? Magnetic media doesn't have to be refreshed like RAM.

To adress your second concern I would say that the only viable solution for home computing backups has been to backup to another hd for a couple of years now. Backup systems that handles hundreds of GBs are just way too expensive. I solved the problem by just backing up my mail, documents, projects and so on (300MB). The other 50GB I can download from my friends if I ever get a total crash...

The current implementations of NTFS and ext2fs is said to handle 2TB. Figure running a defrag on such a beast!

Circular?

[NeuroManson]

I hope they aren't thinking of using the design that the example shows, it's an awfully inefficient use of space... Would be more effective to either make the particles pyramidic, that way you could have an even smaller point for magnetic fields and since it tapers at the tip, less chance for "crosstalk" from one particle to the next... Since we're talking something on a molecular scale, there would probably be less in the way of drag or heat buildup, whereas the cylindrical design is just begging for it...

Re:Circular?

[clark625]

You would think that a pyramid would be a neat advance, but it's probably not feasable. The costs associated currently are too high for consideration.

The problem with pyramids is the formation. Hard drive manufacturers like to use Si, polymers, metals, and the like. Doing a photolithography step on them isn't difficult--but finding an etchant that will prefer to etch in a pyramidal shape is rather tough. If you can find one, it usually will etch down such that you end up with pyramids facing into the substrate.

Not that it can't be done. I recall some work done creating pyramids on GaAs substrates. It may be extendable to other material systems as well. But GaAs is a zincblend crystal structure--not a diamond structure like Si is. The zincblend readily makes itself agreeable to off-axis etching (especially if you get the proper offcut wafer).

Maybe if the polymer could be self-assembling and would itself produce the desired pyramidal shapes, then everyone would be happy. Doing a metalization step over top of that would not be difficult at all. But I'm not terribly great at dealing with polymers--I don't know where the limits of self-assembly are. I'm sure someone else does, though--and I know of several journal papers you might consider.
Anyways--your idea is good, but it's an ideal. At this moment, there doesn't really exist a practical way to make metalized pyramids without steps that would either be prohibitively expensive (I'm talking processing time here), or steps that would require too large of feature size.

Re:cool. I mean, hot

[jonelf]

Not necessarily because higher density means that you will cover more data at the same speed.

Today we have 160GB disks with under 10ms seek time. 1TB isn't that far off and you could always increase the number of heads.

Re:cool. I mean, hot

[chamenos]

Well,

1.The reason hard drives have been getting hotter and noiser, is due to the rpm getting higher and higher, in order to increase the data transfer rate. Now, since what this new technology does is increase the density of data stored on the hard drive by about 10 times, and subsequently by almost 50 times, more data would be able to be read by the read/write heads of the hard drive in one pass. Therefore, the hard drives's data transfer rate would increase when operating at the same rpm as your current hard drive, without needing to get any faster. The data transfer rate would still be faster even if you slowed it down by a bit. So basically, the hard drive probably wouldn't get any hotter than what's available today, since there's no need for the rpm to increase and even if it does get faster (and thus, hotter), the noise and heat increase caused by the faster rpm would be well be worth it when considering the very substantial increase in the resulting data transfer rate.

A 5,400rpm 160GB hard drive would have a higher transfer rate than a 7,200rpm 20GB hard drive, assuming they both use the same number of discs and read-write heads, etc. If what IBM & GE predict comes true, then such a hard drive with the predicted initial 10 times increase in data density would only have to spin at around 540rpm, in order to get the data transfer rate as the 5,400rpm 160GB hard drive I mentioned earlier. This is of course assuming the storage capacity remains the same (160GB). Therefore, noise and heat would both go down since this imagined hard drive of mine would spin at one tenth the speed of a 5,400rpm hard drive, which is already considered slow now.

2.That's assuming you do store a terabyte on your laptop. And it does state in the article that the technology is predicted to be ready for the market by around 2008. By then, I think it would be very safe to assume that optical storage would have made substantial leaps and bounds by then. Most probably, by that time 27GB writable or re-writable blu-ray discs might have already become commonplace and backing up a terrabyte hard drive wouldn't be much harder than backing up a 45GB hard drive today with 700MB CD-R or CD-RW discs. Easier, in fact.

Basically, if this new technogloy works as planned, I really don't see how its going to pose any new problems that we don't already have with magnetic data storage. In fact it would more likely alleviate and lessen some of the problems we do have, such as the problems of noise and heat. Power consumption might go up though, due to the smaller footprint of the bits being stored and hence the stronger amplification needed to read the bit, though a lower rpm might make up for this (suspected) increase in power consumption. However I'm not too sure about this, so someone correct me or enlighten me if I'm wrong. Also, seek times might go up but then again, they will most probably have solved this problem as well by the time this new technology becomes available.

In conclusion, you either aren't familiar with how hard drives work, or haven't yet read the article properly. In either case, your fears are rather unfounded.