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."

Comments

Re:Bit = Binary Digit

[sexconker]

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.

A megabyte always has been and always will be binary-based.

MB is not an SI scalar, nor did it ever pretend to be, nor is it conflicting with the SI scalar M.

The only confusion comes about when you try to insist that MB is infringing on some sacred, arbitrarily-based notion that all major scalars must be factors of 1000.

The "classical" units and scalars are themselves ambiguous. What does M mean? Meter? Mass? Minute? Mega? Milli? What does G mean? Gram? Giga? The gravitational constant? Is K kilo? Is it the spring constant? Is it Kelvin?

You can impose all the capitalization and styling rules you want, but the bottom line is that people cannot distinguish the 17 ways you write the letter "u", nor will they replicate them easily or reliably.
People read technical descriptions in context.

When you see MB, you KNOW you're talking about megabytes, and you KNOW bytes are binary. If you fail at this, you're either a marketer for storage devices (liar), or you should not be working with computer-related things.

Re:Bit = Binary Digit

[hairyfeet]

Well I can see why the guy would complain, after all marketing drones fucked us with the whole "Megabyte" bullshit in the first place. For those that are too young to remember once upon a time we didn't have that "Gibi" bullshit, because frankly we didn't need it. Everyone knew a byte was 8 bits, so everyone knew base 10 didn't apply in computers, being binary and all.

But then came the "Race to 1Gb!" which was trumpeted by the PC rags and which the marketing drones knew would make whichever storage company hit it first a truckload of cash. so some asswipe in marketing gets the bright idea "Hey, if we go by base 10 instead of base 2 like everybody else, we can say our drives are bigger than they actually are! we'll make a fortune!" and now we have guys here arguing with a straight face that we should do it like the marketing drones even though a byte is STILL 8 bits.

So as long as it stays a 1:1 ratio, I have no problem with it. But if some marketing asshat figures out a way to fudge the numbers to make their drives look bigger again I say we take them out back and stone them with old Deathstars as a warning to the marketing drones not to fuck with our numbering systems again.

Re:I read TFA

[noidentity]

I read TFA. They claim that this will increase the density 5x.

Actually, the article actually only claims about a 4x increase (actually only 3.62):

Toshiba's sample media is still in the prototype stage, but is built at a density equivalent to 2.5 terabits per square inch. Contrast that with Toshiba's current highest capacity drive today, which is based on existing technology and has a density of 541 gigabits per square inch or about one fifth that of the new technology.