StorageDensity
Latest
Western Digital doubles HDD storage densities
It seems like hard drive manufacturers are all about the bold claims this week -- hot on the heels of Hitachi's promise to deliver 4TB drives in 2011, Western Digital is doing a little chest-thumping over its "successful demonstration" of a drive with a storage density of 520 gigabits per square inch. That's more than double today's max of 200Gb per square inch, and WD says cramming bits in that tight will result in 3TB 3.5-inch drives by 2010. Hmm, 1TB less one year sooner? Storage fanboys, to the comments!
Seagate claims world record for magnetic recording density
While researchers in academia have the luxury of playing around with exotic technologies like nano-clusters, shape-shifting lasers, and nanomagnetic vortices, the engineers at Seagate know that they actually have to profit off of their research, so for now they're sticking with traditional magnetic recording techniques in order to push the limits of hard drive capacity with new and exciting storage densities. Using now-standard perpendicular recording heads and media manufactured with current production techniques, the company recently demoed drives with a record-breaking 421Gb/in² data density, which should allow for 500GB 2.5-inch notebook drives, 2.5TB 3.5-inch desktop drives, and 1-inch to 1.8-inch consumer electronics drives that can store between 40GB and an impressive 275GB, starting in 2009. Looking beyond perpendicular recording, Seagate researchers say that the still nascent Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) and bit patterned media techniques should eventually allow mind-boggling densities of up to 50Tb/in², which is surely more space than anyone could possibly need, ever. (We know that last part's actually untrue, but we just included it so that future generations perusing our archives can have a good, hindsight-enabled laugh at our naïveté).
IBM, Fujifilm developing 8 terabyte magnetic tape cartridges
If you thought that magnetic tape cartridges were headed the way of Zip disks and five-and-a-quarter-inch floppies into the storage medium graveyard, think again, because IBM and Fujifilm are currently working together to make the venerable technology capable of storing a Blu-ray-humbling eight terabytes-per-cartridge. Using barium ferrite crystal film from Fuji and read/write technology from IBM, the two companies are reporting success in creating storage densities of up to 6.67 billion-bits/square-inch, which is something like fifteen times the capacility of current backup tape. Unfortunately there is no word yet if the cartridges, which should be available in about five years, will be able to fit in your old 8-track player for rocking millions and millions of MP3s.
Breakthrough in ferroelectric materials could enable million-GB thumbdrives
While we have to agree with certain Engadget readers who feel that 640KB of RAM is plenty for most computing tasks, those darn scientists just keep looking for ways to stuff more and more data into smaller spaces. The latest breakthrough on the storage tip comes courtesy of researchers from Drexel and Penn, who have found a way to stabilize the simple physical property of ferroelectricity at the nano scale, making possible such obviously unnecessary densities as 12,800,000GB per cubic centimeter. Ferroelectric materials are usable as memory because they possess the ability to switch electric charges in so-called dipole moments, but before Drexel's Dr. Jonathan Spanier and colleagues decided to embed the materials in water, it had previously been impossible to screen those dipole moments at scales small enough to be useful. Don't expect to be able to buy a zillion gig, water-filled iPod anytime soon, though, as the research team still faces significant hurdles in actually assembling the nanowires that would make up such a drive with the proper density as well as developing a method of efficiently reading and writing data.
