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Seagate Overcomes Superparamagnetic Limit

Posted by chrisd on from the my-1gb-microdrive-just-died dept.

Longinus writes "Yahoo! News is reporting that hard drive manufacturer Seagate has "overcome a significant challenge in magnetic memory with a new technology capable of achieving far beyond today's storage densities -- up to as great as 50 terabits per square inch. Currently, the highest storage densities hover around 50 gigabits per square inch, but Seagate said its heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology could break through the so-called superparamagnetic limit -- a memory boundary based on data bits so small they become magnetically unstable." Perhaps the near future of storage technology lies, for now, not in nanotech or holography, but still in magnetic recording."

4 of 352 comments (clear)

  1. To put things into perspective... by asparagus · · Score: 5, Informative

    A 40GB/platter drive (4 platters = 160GB) has a density of 80 gigabits/inch.

    So, @ 50 terabits/inch, you could have ~25TB/platter hard drives, or about 100TB in the same form factor as the current maxtors.

    G'damn.

    -asparagus

  2. Moore's Law by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    Moore's Law only states that the density of switching elements (transistors) on a silicon substrate will double about every 18 months. Moore's Law emphatically does NOT state that computing power will double every 18 months.

    Recap:
    Computing Power != Transistor Density

    Just a quick clarification. :)

  3. Some calculations by grahamsz · · Score: 5, Informative

    So at 50Tbit/in^2 that means that a 3.5" drive with 4 double sided platters might hold

    Area of disk (considering .5" hole)
    9.62 - 0.196 = 9.424 in^2

    8 Data surfaces

    8 * 9.424 =~ 75 in^2

    Total data storage:

    75 * 50 / 8 = 471 Terabytes!
    471 TB = 517869976682496 bytes

    Bits needed to address this number of bytes:

    ceil (ln (517869976682496) / ln (2)) = 49

    And thankfully so long as we have a 64 bit architecture then reiserfs will happily work :)

  4. Re:BIOS capability by SQL+Error · · Score: 5, Informative

    State of the art is ATA/ATAPI-6 a.k.a. "Big Drive". It supports 48-bit addressing. That's 48-bit sector addressing, so the maximum size of a disk is 144 Petabytes. This standard also supports transferring 32MB of data in a single I/O. This is at least partly implemented in ATA-133 controllers.

    After hitting limits at every factor of 4 (32MB, 128MB, 512MB, 2GB, 8GB, 32GB and most recently 128GB), they've finally got it right.

    Take a look here for more details.