Tuesday, June 26, 2007
A new technique is being researched to expand the life of perpendicular recording in hard disk drives. It is said that the disk track media might be able to nearly double the density of bits on a disk.However, this approach is still controversial.
Currently, drives depend on placing a read/write head over a certain spot on a disk to find a particular piece of data. The new technique defines data locations by patterning continuous tracks on to a bare disk before it is integrated into a drive. The tracks are defined by placing on the media layers of materials with different magnetic characteristics.
"It's probably not a factor of two better than today's approach, but just how much better it is is still being debated, said John Best, chief technologist with Hitachi Global Storage Technologies. "The whole method is still controversial even within our company," Best said.
It's not yet clear whether the technique would be significantly less expensive than a separate method that defines a unique space on a blank disk for each data bit. That approach, called bit patterned media, is seen as a next major leap in magnetic recording technology but could take five years to bring to market.
By: Doc Memory
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