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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."

9 of 352 comments (clear)

  1. Fav Quote by Winnipenguin · · Score: 5, Funny

    The need for higher storage density -- the number of data bits stored on a disk surface -- already has been addressed with smaller bits, but these data chunks are becoming so small that they will be magnetically unstable within the next five to 10 years, researchers said.

    This is the real reason hard drive warranties have been getting shorter.

  2. We need backup media! by Beetjebrak · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The gap between the price/size ratio of harddisks and that of backup media/drives is becoming ever wider. It's getting almost exponentially more expensive to back up all of your data, Moore doesn't apply to tape backup I guess. What we need is a reliable, fast and cheap system to back up those 200+GB disk arrays without fuss and preferably on a single piece of media. ADR seems nice, but in my experience the reliability is sloppy.. Other alternatives are WAY too expensive compared to how cheap it is to build huge disk arrays.

    --
    Learn from the mistakes of others. There isn't enough time to make them all yourself.
  3. I said just this morning.... by gadfium · · Score: 5, Funny

    during a code review, that using 32-bit integers to store the number of sectors on the hard disk would be fine.

    Perhaps I should revisit that piece of code....

  4. 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?

    --
    Are you local? There's nothing for you here!
  5. 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? =]

    --
    .f00Dave
  6. 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

  7. 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 :)

  8. Longinus!?! by Scholasticus · · Score: 5, Funny

    According to legend, Longinus was the Roman soldier who pierced the side of Christ with a spear. That spear was for a long time believed to have a role in controlling the destiny of the world. Adolf Hitler spent years and millions of deutschmarks searching for the Spear of Longinus. It's no coincidence that Longinus himself posted this story. The Spear of Longinus was said during the Middle Ages to "havve propertyies of needed to peerce the superparamagnetism barrier," (according to Nostradamus) which will bring on the end times.

  9. 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.