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Toshiba Claims Bit-Patterned Drive Breakthrough
CWmike writes "Toshiba will detail a breakthrough in data storage later Wednesday that it says paves the way for hard drives with vastly higher capacity than today, reports Martyn WIlliams. The breakthrough has been made in the research of bit-patterned media, a magnetic storage technology that is being developed for future hard disk drives. Bit-patterned media breaks up the recording surface into numerous magnetic bits, each consisting of a few magnetic grains. Under a microscope, the magnetic bits look like thousands of tiny spheres crammed next to each another. Data is stored on these magnetic bits: One magnetic bit can hold one bit of data. Prototypes of the media have been made before but Toshiba says its engineers have, for the first time, succeeded in producing a media sample in which the magnetic bits are organized into a pattern of rows."
Bit-patterned media breaks up the recording surface into numerous magnetic bits, each consisting of a few magnetic grains. Under a microscope, the magnetic bits look like thousands of tiny spheres crammed next to each another. Data is stored on these magnetic bits: One magnetic bit can hold one bit of data.
Just like every other hard drive! Hooray for the future!
I've heard that patterned media will be too expensive to ever mass produce profitably so the industry will probably use HAMR instead.
So how is this any different than existing HDDs?
Who could have guessed it.
Which moron marketer named these tiny magnetic domains "bits"? It's bad enough we already can't tell whether a "megabyte" is binary or decimal. Now we can't tell whether a "bit" is physical or virtual.
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They claim that this will increase the density 5x.
I eat only the real part of complex carbohydrates.
Whatever happened to bubble memory and optical buses?
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I'm kind of curious; after the "Get Perpendicular!" video, how's Toshiba going to top Hitachi in the "silly video explaining your new technology" race?
After reading TFA, I'm almost scared that it'll involve some sort of cartoon magnetic grain orgy.
It's really quite obvious. Current drives have continuous media. Put very simply, this tends to "smear out" the magnetic field, because there is no magnetic break between the N and S poles of one bit, and the poles of another. This has two bad effects: unreliable bits (location in space), and the possibility that bits will simply flip as the head passes over them. By isolating very, very small domains in a structured way, with nonmagnetic regions between them, the problems are avoided since the bits, being isolated from one another, will not be subject to domain creep or interference.
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here is a link which might explain things more clearly
http://www.bentham.org/nanotec/samples/nanotec1-1/Piramanayagam.pdf
The 'next big thing' in HDD's was supposed to be Solid State...So what are these numchucks doing improving what's now seen as the past??
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Hard drives are way too fragile, I don't want one to hold even 20GiB of data let alone 20PiB. Sure SSD's are expensive, but when you take in account the extra work and media when backing up >1TiB, let alone recovering from a >1TiB disaster, they're really all worth the extra money. Now I've dropped SSD's to the floor and they're fine, try that with a shiny new HDD and you'll regret it pretty soon.
Also, newer HDDs I've bought have failed sooner then old ones. In fact, I have HDDs still running from 2003 that have outlived more HDDs then I can remember exactly from my aging low-tech carbon-based neuron memory.
God help you if you ever need to contact their support.
It will be your fault and your problem.
Supportwise they are far and away the worst of a bad lot
But, bubble memory was more expensive than the hard drives they were intended to replace. Now, we are focused on using various flash memory schemes to accomplish the same feat. Is flash memory related to bubble memory? Who knows, but it fills the same niche, so I'm saying that flash enherited bubble's legacy, to replace hard drives with solid state, non volatile memory
As far as Optical Buses go, isn't that pretty much dominated by Fibre Channel? We use it to connect processors to processors and SANs to processors, so that seems pretty bus-like.
So, maybe the trademarks died, but these products are based on the tech that came before them.
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RIAA must be rolling on the floor having a seizure right about now...
For those who are too lazy to RTFA, here's a very simplified explanation of what's going on:
In current drives a bunch of rather randomly sized and shaped magnetic grains are basically "glued" to the surface of the drive, and the collective orientation of a certain number of those grains (called a domain) determines whether you've got a 1 or a 0.
In this, instead of dumping grains onto the surface, they're using lithography to carve very precise grains onto the disk, which can be made much smaller and more identical in shape, than the random ones allowing for vastly higher storage densities. It's basically applying the same technology used to make computer chips to make hard drives. The technology has actually existed for a while, but the cost per bit to pattern lithograph a hard drive has always been huge; I guess Toshiba has figured out how to bring it under control. Cool stuff.
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You know, I deliberately posted a different version of this summary specifically because the summary that was selected here is a lazy cut-and-paste of the poorly written lead of TFA itself.
And not only wasn't my superior summary not selected, but it's been deleted from the firehose page, where it should appear between Minority Report Style Iris Scanners in Mexico and Cats Lies and the Research PR Machine.
Slashdot has gone from valuable to random, and is going from random to stupid.
I still can't get past the non-standard floppy drives they shipped in the nineties
Definately not a good way to build confidence with the consumer public
Wherever You Go, There You Are
Some people will probably need a car analogy to sum it all up.
Ok - in LA you have seventeen or so lanes of traffic. But because they are all headed the same direction, they all sit at a standstill pointed the direction they are supposed to be going.
Now compare that to Cairo, which has cars going every which way along with camels and a million pedestrians per square mile. In Cairo everyone sits at a standstill, but they may not be pointed where they want to go, with the single side benefit that they can buy figs at any time from a local street vendor.
Wait, what was the subject again?
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Well it is just mostly common sense really. They are doing some incredible densities with this thing.
And the smaller things get, the more likely they are to break during vibrations.
The only way they could overcome the size requirements for the heads would be to have dual heads out of sync with each other, so one reads an odd row, one reads even. This way the heads can be a little larger, but the cost of having two heads, as well as the likeliness of losing either one, is just way too much. (pretty much why N+1 heads were abandoned for a single platter)
Another method was one i mentioned in a previous article: 4 bit storage, or higher.
Obviously the higher it goes though, the more prone to error as the field weakens, which is why hard drives should come standard with rewriting mechanisms to strengthen the field of weaker areas. (essentially the HDDs inverted friend to wear-levelling on SSDs)
But with higher bits comes massive increases in density. 4 bits alone would make 2 bit seem like something from the 70s.
So, it really is worth it... until SSDs came along, which has essentially started putting the nails on the coffin.
HDDs, one of the few remaining mechanical parts to be replaced in the majority. Its time is almost up.
were originally the same size as the US currency in use in the late nineteenth century have to do with anything?
Punchdcards were later shifted to 96 columns and the dimensions of the card shrunk from the old format (which I still remember fondly along with my old IBM 29 keypunch,) to these tiny punch cards.
None of this made any sense back in the nineteen-seventies and none of this makes any sense now.
A typical record was an integer divisable fraction of the 19k 3330 DASD write buffer length when I was working for CN back in the late nineteen-seventies.
Later when I was responsible for coming up with an archiving scheme for Canada Post, when the so-called records could be scanned images of payroll records from the nineteen-thirties and forties, there was no such thing as a fixed format for an employees' file and the hundreds and thousands of transaction records.
Depending on a fixed format record layout is something reprehensible only a unit-record fascist would do.
Reality is a lot more flexible.
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In music recording land there is this segment that loves the sound of recording on analog tape (trust me, there IS a "sound", but thats a different discussion), despite its disadvantages.
Well analog machines are now rare, hard to maintain, etc. To meet this demand, there is a unit that has a tape roll inside it. As you record to it, it then digitizes the signal and sends it to your computer. However the unit is pretty expensive, like $8K.
But who's to say one has to record on actual tape for analog? Isn't tape as its basic construction, no different than a hard drive? There's a substrate (tape = plastic, HD = platter) and both uses metal oxide (rust) as the magnetic medium. A record head aligns the particles as needed, whether it be data or analog signal. The difference is that tape always is rubbing against a record/play head (which then rubs away the oxide), and the constant flexing of the plastic weakens the glue binder, which makes the oxide shed. On a hard drive a head is always floating above the platter. Wouldn't it be a simple matter of creating a sound recording head that would float above platter, AND record/play an analog signal? The only reason tape is pressed against the head is for alignment purposes and consistency. We'd get the best of both worlds: analog sound, and hard drive life. I could even see room for a small Dolby SR style circuit to reduce hiss.
An analog recording hard drive, that my new device.
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When will we get the fun song-and-dance explanation of the technology, just like we did when perpendicular recording was coming out?
If the boundaries between the bits are more "discreet", then they are more hidden. If the boundaries between the bits are more "discrete", then they are more distinct, and presumably will interfere with each other less often.
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For someone nitpicking someone else's lingual mistakes, it's ironic you missed the fact that it *wasn't* an example of incorrect grammar!
:-P
BTW, *this* is a grammar Nazi.
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Sounds like this may help alleviate some crashes due to magnetic "wobble"
I want to see the PizzaAnalogyGuy version!
In his absence, I'll come up with one. Say you're storing data on a pizza in the layout of "sausage" (seasoned ground beef pieces) over the pizza's surface. If you just put the sausage on top of the cheese, you need fairly large areas of sausage to make discernable areas. But if you lay down a grid of pepperoni first, you can put a piece of sausage or nothing on each piece of pepperoni.
I see the future is being a mix. Solid state for my boot drive containing all my programs and such. Magnetic media for my Bittorrent and iTunes drive where I need space but not speed (afterall write speeds to those drives are limited by my dirt slow internet speed, and read speads only have to be quick enough to keep up with playback).
Then what kind of storage do you recommend for a GarageBand and iMovie drive? These are for the interactive creation of works, so they need speed, but the works are digital signals as opposed to text, so they also need space.
My write speed is usually limited by the fact that some large memory program gets swapped out to disk
If you swap for a reason other than putting /tmp on a RAM disk, then you need more RAM. If you cannot fit more RAM in your PC, then you need a motherboard that isn't nearly a decade old like the one in my PC.
Thousands of tiny luminous spheres, I presume
Dude, if you need to see an iPhone to know if someone is gay you are in serious trouble! Have you noticed how your ass keeps being fondled every time you are in a crowd?
Hrm, I don't seem to have that problem. Maybe I should buy new pants.
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Maybe you're even too ugly for the fags.
For god's sake why do they have to keep on focusing on higher capacity? We need more performance, not capacity. More capacity without performance makes the management of data a horribly slow process.