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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."
They claim that this will increase the density 5x.
I eat only the real part of complex carbohydrates.
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.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
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.
Yeah, but there will be a million regular HDDs for sale that are mislabeled as ADHDs...
Today is red jello day - all workers must eat all of their red jello. Failure to comply will result in five demerits.
Obsolete 2TB spinning platter device = $99.99
New hotness 640GB flash device = $14,500.00
Oh, well then... There's nothing really stopping me from being the next Governor of California. Jump on the bandwagon for my inevitable victory!
The smart hard drive vendor would realize that spinning platters are not going anywhere, especially in large enterprise situations where a LOT of money is to be made, and that if you increase the density of the platters (5x according to TFA) then you can also increase the performance of the drive to possibly match or exceed the sequential read speeds of current SSD.
Spinning platter HDD are not going anywhere until SSD prices become CHEAPER per byte than regular HDD. Regular HDD technology is still improving, as witnessed by this article, and there is no telling when it will slow/stop, or when SSD technology will slow/stop. It is perfectly conceivable for technology to get to a point where SSD can no longer increase in capacity without increasing physical size, while spinning platter may continue to increase capacity with the same form factor. It is also possible that spinning platters may some day greatly exceed the performance of SSD.
You sound like the kind of person who would be surprised to hear that tapes are still widely used for backing up and archiving data.