Seagate Reaches 1 Terabit Per Square Inch Milestone In Hard Drive Storage With New Te

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edited April 2012 in Tech & Games
CUPERTINO, Calif. - March 19, 2012 - Seagate (NASDAQ:STX) has become the first hard drive maker to achieve the milestone storage density of 1 terabit (1 trillion bits) per square inch, producing a demonstration of the technology that promises to double the storage capacity of today’s hard drives upon its introduction later this decade and give rise to 3.5-inch hard drives with an extraordinary capacity of up to 60 terabytes over the 10 years that follow. The bits within a square inch of disk space, at the new milestone, far outnumber stars in the Milky Way, which astronomers put between 200 billion and 400 billion.
Seagate reached the landmark data density with heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR), the next- generation recording technology. The current hard drive technology, Perpendicular Magnetic Recording (PMR), is used to record the spectrum of digitized data – from music, photos, and video stored on home desktop and laptop PCs to business information housed in sprawling data centers – on the spinning platters inside every hard drive. PMR technology was introduced in 2006 to replace longitudinal recording, a method in place since the advent of hard drives for computer storage in 1956, and is expected to reach its capacity limit near 1 terabit per square inch in the next few years.
“The growth of social media, search engines, cloud computing, rich media and other data-hungry applications continues to stoke demand for ever greater storage capacity,” said Mark Re, senior vice president of Heads and Media Research and Development at Seagate. “Hard disk drive innovations like HAMR will be a key enabler of the development of even more data-intense applications in the future, extending the ways businesses and consumers worldwide use, manage and store digital content.”
Hard drive manufacturers increase areal density and capacity by shrinking a platter’s data bits to pack more within each square inch of disk space. They also tighten the data tracks, the concentric circles on the disk’s surface that anchor the bits. The key to areal density gains is to do both without disruptions to the bits’ magnetization, a phenomenon that can garble data. Using HAMR technology, Seagate has achieved a linear bit density of about 2 million bits per inch, once thought impossible, resulting in a data density of just over 1 trillion bits, or 1 terabit, per square inch – 55 percent higher than today’s areal density ceiling of 620 gigabits per square inch.
The maximum capacity of today’s 3.5-inch hard drives is 3 terabytes (TB), at about 620 gigabits per square inch, while 2.5-inch drives top out at 750 gigabytes (GB), or roughly 500 gigabits per square inch. The first generation of HAMR drives, at just over 1 terabit per square inch, will likely more than double these capacities – to 6TB for 3.5-inch drives and 2TB for 2.5-inch models. The technology offers a scale of capacity growth never before possible, with a theoretical areal density limit ranging from 5 to 10 terabits per square inch – 30TB to 60TB for 3.5-inch drives and 10TB to 20TB for 2.5-inch drives.
The 1 terabit per square inch demonstration extends a long line of storied technology firsts for Seagate, including:
  • 1980: ST-506, the first hard drive, at 5.25 inches, small enough to be widely deployed in early microcomputers, the precursor of the modern PC. The 5 megabyte drive cost $1,500.
  • 1992: The first 7200RPM hard drive, a Barracuda ® drive
  • 1996: The first 10,000RPM hard drive, a Cheetah ® drive
  • 2000: The first 15,000RPM drive, also a Cheetah hard drive
  • 2006: Momentus ® 5400.3 drive, a 2.5-inch laptop drive and the world’s first drive to feature perpendicular magnetic recording technology
  • 2007: Momentus FDE (Full Disk Encryption) drive, the industry’s first self-encrypting hard drive
  • 2010: Momentus XT drive, the first solid state hybrid hard drive, combining traditional spinning media with NAND flash, to deliver speeds rivaling solid state drives (SSDs)
Seagate achieved the 1 terabit per square inch breakthroughs in materials science and near-field optics at its heads and media research and development centers in Bloomington, Minnesota, and Fremont, California.
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Seagate has demonstrated the first terabit-per-square-inch hard drive, almost doubling the areal density found in modern hard drives. Initially this will result in 6TB 3.5-inch desktop drives and 2TB 2.5-inch laptop drives, but eventually Seagate is promising up to 60TB and 20TB respectively.
To achieve such a huge leap in density, Seagate had to use a technology called heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR). Basically, the main issue that governs hard drive density is the size of each magnetic “bit.” These can only be made so small until the magnetism of nearby bits affects them. With HAMR, “high density” magnetic compounds that can withstand further miniaturization are used. The only problem is that these materials, such as iron platinum alloy or a sprinkling of table salt (really), are more stubborn when it comes to changing their magnetism (i.e. writing data) — but if you heat it first, that problem goes away.
HAMR, which was originally demonstrated by Fujitsu in 2006, adds a laser to the hard drive head. The head seeks as normal, but whenever it wants to write data the laser turns on (pictured below). Reading data is done in the conventional way. Just so you understand how small the magnetic bits are in a HAMR drive, one terabit per square inch equates to two million bits per linear inch; in other words, each site is just 12.7 nanometers long — or about a dozen atoms.
heat-assisted-magnetic-recording-vs.-perpendicular-640x438.jpg
In theory, HAMR should allow for areal densities up to 10 terabits per square inch (magnetic bits just 1nm long!), and thus desktop hard drives in the 60TB range. Meanwhile, conventional perpendicular recording is expected to hit one terabit in the next few years, but the roadmap to greater densities isn’t very clear. There is no word on the cost of HAMR drives, or whether the addition of a laser will significantly increase power consumption.
The biggest winner from larger hard drives, of course, is cloud storage and computing — but then again, the other angle is that you’ll have so much local storage that the cloud seems a bit pointless, especially when we all have 100Mbps internet connections. But then again, with the unstoppable surge of smartphones and tablets and flash memory, do mechanical hard drives really have a future in consumer electronics?

Well, in short, I would be able to buy 6TB drives in future which is AWESOME!

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