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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!
"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."
Just like every other hard drive! Oh, wait...
They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it's not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance. - Terry Pratchett
From what I read in the article, it looks like Toshiba's reduced the number of magnetic grains per bit from a few hundred down to just a few. Otherwise it appears everything is the same.
They claim that this will increase the density 5x.
I eat only the real part of complex carbohydrates.
Except that current HDDs use a wider area of surface to write the data too as compared to this.
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
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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For the uniformed: with today's technology, a 1:1 correlation between data bits and magnetic "bits" is nearly impossible. We have to interleave data bits with clock bits, so we are able to count runs of equal bits. So the data bits are encoded on this interleaved stream of data and clock/sync bits before it is actually stored in the physical medium. If the bit-patterned layout doubles as a clock/sync mechanism we can store only the data bits (with error correcting codes too, of course).