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HGST develops helium-filled, high-capacity hard drives: no, they won't float away
With certain exceptions, talk of advanced hard drive technology regularly has a tough time escaping research labs. Western Digital's HGST is promising a much more tangible project that could boost data capacities by a wide margin. By filling the gaps between drive platters with less buffeting-prone helium instead of air, HGST can safely fit as many as seven platters in a typical, 3.5-inch desktop hard drive instead of the current five. Going with the lower density gas creates a raft of side benefits, such as fitting more data on a single platter along with reducing the drag that both slows down and heats up the disk. We'll have to wait until 2013 to see shipping helium-filled drives in our PCs; given the slightly exotic nature of the technique, though, we wouldn't count on HGST or Western Digital handing out drives for free like balloons at a birthday party.
Salt enables six times the storage capacity for snail-unfriendly hard drives
Salt: sure, you might use it to cure meats for your latest solar-powered circumnavigation. But hold onto your kippers, Magellan, because Singaporean scientists have found that sodium chloride -- ordinary table salt! -- can also dramatically increase storage capacity. You see, typical hard drives have randomly-arranged magnetic grains, which allow data density of about 0.5 terabit per square inch. But a high-resolution e-beam lithography process, aided by our good friend NaCl, arranges the grains in a tighter, more orderly fashion, upping the density to 3.3 terabits per square inch. Called nanopatterning, this technique enables a 1TB drive to hold 6TB without additional platters; it also works with current manufacturing technology, meaning no expensive upgrades. If that's got you dreaming of a higher-capacity future, hit the source link for more glorious technical details. We'll warn you, though: the pictures of luscious, bee-stung lips stop here.
Seagate copies Samsung's notes, re-breaks areal-density barrier with 1TB HDD platters
What better way for Seagate to celebrate its $1.375 billion dollar purchase of Samsung's HDD division than to re-introduce the old firm's breakthrough? Seagate took the Samsung's 1TB platter prototypes and packed them into a real hard drive, bringing the new technology to market for the first time. These new drives will boast an areal-density of 625 gigabits (78.13GB) per square inch, scoring 1TB platters for the outfit's next generation of hard disks. Unfortunately, Seagate won't be cramming four of those 1TB plates into a single hard drive as Samsung originally planned, instead opting to debut the technology in a 3TB external drive under their GoFlex brand. No official specs this time around, but when the turkey was on Samsung's platter, it spun at 5,400 RPM with a 32MB cache and SATA 6Gbps compatibility.
Samsung HDD manages 1TB per platter, areal-density enthusiasts rejoice
Solid state drives are the geek storage of choice, what with their quiet nature, blazing fast speed, and stunning good looks. However, the limited capacity and sky-high price of SSDs keeps many of us buying traditional disk-based storage solutions -- which is just fine considering Samsung keeps finding ways to fit more bits and bytes on every drive. Last year, Sammy's EcoGreen F4EG squeezed 2TB onto a 3-platter drive (or 667GB per platter), and now the company's primed to release a new series of Spinpoint drives with even greater areal density at a time and price that remains TBD. Whenever they do get here, the new HDDs promise to deliver up to 1TB per platter spinning at 5,400RPM -- meaning 4TB desktop drives and a terabyte of storage (courtesy of two 500GB platters) in standard-sized laptop HDDs. The 3.5-inch version packs a 32MB cache and SATA 6Gbps compatibility, while the 2.5-inch variety has an 8MB cache and a 3 Gb/s SATA interface. Knowing all that, only one question remains: could areal-density enthusiasts be the new pixel-density enthusiasts?
New HDD writing methods could boost platter densities by 5x or more
Just when we think that platter-based storage is on its way out it keeps on coming back with a vengeance. A few years ago it was perpendicular recording boosting storage densities by a few orders of magnitude, now it's a pair of new techniques that could push things much further. Your average disk today can manage a couple-hundred GB per square inch while still delivering reliable writes, but if all goes to plan the write methods called bit-patterned recording (BPR) and thermally-assisted recording (TAR) could raise that to 1TB per inch initially and upwards of 10TB per inch down the road. BPR relies on segregating the disk sectors with lithographed "islands" while TAR relies on heating and cooling techniques that preserve the data in nearby sectors. When these Wonder Twins combine, disk sectors can be as small as 15nm in diameter and write speeds can hit 250Mb/sec. Yes, that's megabits, so while you'll be able to store a lot more data than on conventional platters, you won't be able to do so any more quickly than now.
