Wired News: Inside Seagate’s R&D Labs
“When you go down (to the disk surface), you’ll find it’s made of a lot of tiny grains,” Kryder said. “Each is a single crystal of magnetic material…. The reality is, if you make the grain small enough, it becomes unstable.”
Their current solution to this problem is recording data perpendicular to the plane of the media. This technology, however, is expected to peak out at about 1 terabit per square inch. In the next decade, Seagate plans to hit the market with twin technologies that could fly far beyond, ultimately offering as much as 50 terabits per square inch. On a standard 3.5-inch drive, that’s equivalent to 300 terabits of information, enough to hold the uncompressed contents of the Library of Congress.
First up is heat-assisted magnetic recording, or HAMR, which uses lasers to momentarily heat the disk surface and allow the drive heads to write information. When the surface of the drive cools, the bits settle into a more stable state for longer-term reliability. The technology allows a smaller number of grains to be used for each bit of data, taking advantage of high-stability magnetic compounds such as iron platinum. [Read on]