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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. Solid State Memory? by T-Kir · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Yeah, but what is the current progress on the solid state memory devices? I know that there is a Cambridge university team who have got their own division working on this.

    If I remember rightly (this info I read about 3 years ago) they said that they had some HDD manufacturers (probably IBM at the time) were very interested in the tech, and their initial projections were about 2.2TB for a credit card sized module. Although they were still early in research/development, I wonder how they (or any others) are doing now?

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    Are you local? There's nothing for you here!
  2. Re:Moore is my wallet's friend by f00Dave · · Score: 5, Interesting

    This is *way* beyond Moore's Law, though. They're proposing a thousand-fold increase in storage densities, which equates to (approximately) ten doublings, not one every year and a half. According to Moore's Law, we shouldn't be approaching those densities for another 15 years....

    So, who's been lying to us all along? The hard drive manufacturers or the physicists? =]

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    .f00Dave
  3. Then what are we do to store long term data? by toupsie · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Good point! I scares me that more storage is starting to mean less long term data integrity. I have been thinking about long term data stability for a while. I do a ton of digital photography. Its backed up on CDs and stored on an IBM hard drive. Its photos I want to share with my Grandkids when they show up. My Grandparents old photos survived the years on paper. Will my gigabytes of photos survive for my Grandchildren?

    I still have 5 1/4 floppys that were formated in 1982 that work on an old Apple ][ but I am sure they can't last another 5 years in storage. Are we just in a constant race against the degrading of our storage medium? Constantly pushing data from one standard to another? Paper seems to be a hell of a lot better long term storage medium than magnetic media.

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    Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
  4. Moore's Law by Muerte23 · · Score: 4, Interesting
    You seem to have misunderstood Moore's Law. Moore simply stated that the processing capability per dollar _seemed_ to double every 18 months. Moore's Law is NOT a law of physics. It seems to current be a natural result of research and current technology.

    On a side note, in 1991 I bought a 40 megabyte hard drive because it was affordable (~$100). Now in 2002 I just bought an 80 Gigabyte hard drive for about $100. That's a factor of 2000 increase in storage power -> 2^11.

    Now 11 * 18 months = 17 years. 1991 + 17 years = 2008! We're way ahead of schedule! Unlesss you revise Moore's law for storage and say that it doubles every 12 months, then the fit is almost perfect.

    So if you compare these, each year it takes your $100 CPU longer and longer to process everything on your $100 hard drive. Eventually, hard drives will be so large that they contain more data that your CPU can process!

    Just a diversion.

    Muerte