Nanotube Lube Replenishment for Massive Drives

PetManimal writes "Techworld reports that Seagate has just patented something called 'Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording,' which features nanotechnology and could lead to a 1.46TB 2.5-in. drive. The article says 'Storing data properly in extremely small areas requires the magnetic material to be heated during the writing phase, but this causes the lubricant film deposited on top of the magnetized recording layer to evaporate. Seagate's patent resolves this problem by having a reservoir inside the disk casing that contains nanotube-based lubricant. Some of this is periodically pumped out as a vapor and deposited on the surface of the disk, replenishing the evaporated lubricant.'"

Comments

Drives needing lube?

[CRiMSON]

I wonder if this will lower the mean time to failure of these drives? I currently have some old 9G scsi disks that have been running daily since 1998/1999 and still work flawlessly. How much lube are they putting in these drives? It seems to me this could be bad thing(tm) put enough lube in for 3 years, and every 3 years sell new drives.

Re:Drives needing lube?

[Gat0r30y]

Seagate has a 5 year warranty on every drive. It is intended that the lube will last the life of the drive.

Correct me if I'm wrong...

[The Living Fractal]

.. But, after reading about this days ago, I was under the impression the lubricant itself wasn't 'nanotube based' but rather was distributed across the platters in a controlled fashion via nanotubes. Insofar that the tubes themselves only allow a certain, small, amount of the lubricant to escape and only when the absence of lubricant on the surface produces enough differential pressure to allow it.

And, incidentally, the ten year life of the lubricant reservoir should be sufficient IMHO. I can't imagine in ten years we'll still be using the same hard drives anyway. I think Seagate is banking on it.

TLF

Re:Correct me if I'm wrong...

[mrxak]

Oh good, at least one person is actually talking about the article. Do you have a link to whatever it was you were reading a few days ago?

I should think that 10 years would be enough, assuming capacities keep going up at about the same rate they have been. However, is this is average usage, or heavy? I tend to give my hard drives a pretty heavy workout, and if that cut the time down to 5 years, I'd be pretty upset.

no new business for jiffylube

[atarione]

no new business for jiffylube... tubes will be Life of System component (from the Patent)

[0031] The lubricant reservoir 60 may deliver fixed vapor pressure of the saturant into the environment. One embodiment uses a nanoporous material which contains significant porosity and is composed of a non-reactive material. For example, the nanoporous material may comprise carbon nanotubes 70, as illustrated in FIG. 4. Typical dimensions for each nanotube 70 are from about 0.1 to about 10 nm in diameter D and from about 1 to about 50 nm long L. As a particular example, each nanotube 70 can be about 0.7 nm in diameter and about 10 nm long. The number of nanotubes 70 provided in the reservoir 60 may be selected in order to contain a sufficient amount of lubricant for supply to the recording media during the lifetime of the system, e.g., a minimum of at least 5 or 10 years. For example, several hundred thousand or several million nanotubes may be used.

and oh yeah so after whatever date 5 10 yrs (whatever they decided to supply the tubes for the drive will be done it appears.

Re:Yay!

[LWATCDR]

Hardware patents == O.K.
Software patents == evil.

At least to the OSS community.

Re:Hard drive manufacturers are idiots.

[Monkelectric]

Smaller = Faster. You can do one of two things to make a HD faster, spin the platters faster, or increase density so more data is passing under the heads.

We have a few 8-year old drives in production

[wsanders]

These are 1998 vintage Sun 9G and no-name 9G ATA drives. Still running. Many more 1999-vintage 9G's out there, maybe 5% of our total. Still useful for such clusterable "applicance" applications as DNS servers. Nevertheless, when the machine dies (more likely due to a 99-cent CPU fan locking up) we just chuck the whole machine.

Considering that the latest drives are far more reliable than those old crappy things, a finite 10-year life for a disk drive is definitely Planned Obsolescence for Filling Up Landfills. Bah!

If they will offer a liberal trade-in allowance for recycling, then OK. Pretty much 100% of our disks are mirrored anyway.

Flash vs. Magnetic Drive

[Brit_in_the_USA]

And everyone has been complaining about the limited number of write cycles of flash memory.

Looks like the technogies are reach equivalence by making Hard drives worse !

Where does it Evaporate To?

[ChronoFish]

I know I'm a little dense, but where would the lubricant evaporate to?

I mean the HDs built today are sealed to prevent dust and moisture from coming in. wouldn't it also prevent moisture from leaving?

If the lubricant condenses to the lid, it would seem there would be a way to capture and recycle it. You shouldn't have to run out.

Better yet let it run in a lubricant bath - then you avoid evaporation and application of it all together.

-CF