|
|
|
|
Are 400 gigabyte hard drives near? Yes! IBM "pixie dust" breaks hard drive barrierIBM will unveil a new innovation in hard drive technology Monday that breaks what many in the industry saw as a glass ceiling. In each of the past five years, hard drive capacities have doubled, keeping storage costs low and allowing technophiles and PC users to sock away more data. However, storage buffs believed the rate of growth could continue for only so long, and many asserted that the storage industry was about to hit the physical limit for higher capacities. But according to IBM, a new innovation will push back that limit. Technically called antiferromagnetically-coupled (AFC) media and informally referred to as "pixie dust" at IBM, the innovation introduces a thin layer of the element ruthenium onto the disks inside hard drives where data is stored. AFC allows more data to be packed onto a disk. Jim Porter, president of data storage research firm Disk/Trend, said prices of hard drives are unlikely to increase dramatically because AFC increases the density and storage capacity without the addition of expensive disks, where data is stored, or of heads, which read data off the disks. Before AFC, hard drives could store about 20 gigabits of data per square inch. IBM unveiled new Travelstar drives this spring that use AFC. The drives, which began shipping in volume three weeks ago, can store 25.7 gigabits of data per square inch. An IBM representative said the company chose not to publicize AFC until now for competitive reasons. With further refinements to the process of adding the AFC innovation to hard drive production, IBM Research Director Currie Munce expects data densities of 100 gigabits per square inch by 2003. Munce added that AFC will be used across all IBM hard drive product lines. IBM Travelstar drives scheduled for shipment later this year are expected to come with an increased density of another 33 percent. "We've found a way to add AFC to our current hard drive production methods, so we'll be able to double capacity with little or no cost, essentially maintaining or even dropping the price per gigabit," Munce said. AFC will also allow smaller drives to store more data and use less power, which could lead to smaller and quieter devices, Munce said. Drives with densities of 100 gigabits per square inch will enable desktop drives to reach 400GB storage levels, notebooks 200GB, and one-inch Microdrives 6GB. Storage researchers have worked on AFC for years, Porter said. "But IBM is the first to turn theory into practice." Porter pointed out that because AFC is used in current production methods, he expects IBM competitors in the hard drive industry, such as Seagate and Fujitsu, to follow soon. Source:
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1003-200-5976693.html?tag=mn_hd Monday May 21, 2001 12:01 AM ET IBM's New Disk Design Hold More DataBy MAY WONG, AP Technology Writer SAN JOSE, Calif. (AP) - The days of 400-gigabyte hard drives in desktop PCs may be closer than most computer users realize. IBM Corp. says it has cracked a barrier in disk drive design - a breakthrough that would eventually quadruple the data density of a hard disk and give consumers improved options to store their growing amounts of digital data. The Armonk, N.Y.-based company is expected to announce Monday that it is the first company to mass-produce computer hard disk drives using a new type of magnetic coating, achieving levels of data density previously thought to be impossible. It's a three-atom thick layer of ruthenium, a precious metal similar to platinum, sandwiched between two magnetic layers. Scientists at IBM's Almaden Research Center in San Jose have dubbed the layer ``pixie dust.'' Technically, the coating is called ``antiferromagnetically-coupled (AFC) media.'' It addresses the problem of a so-called ``superparamagnetic effect,'' in which data gets lost when the magnetic regions of a disk get too small. With the new design, hard-disk drives will be able to hold up to 100 billion bits of data per square inch. Current methods would have maxed out at 20 to 40 billion bits of data per square inch, which is close to the density of disk drives in use today, IBM said. For consumers who are starting to rack up volumes of digital data from music, photographs and video, the new development would mean that in two years, they could have desktop computers with 400 gigabytes of storage space, IBM said. Today, many PCs come with hard drives ranging from 10 gigabytes to 20 gigabytes. One with 40 gigabytes is on the high end. Also, IBM said hard drives for computer notebooks would be able to hold as much as 200 gigabytes of data, or the equivalent of 42 DVDs or more than 300 CDs. And with IBM's one-inch Microdrive, handheld devices would be able to hold 6 gigabytes or 13 hours of MPEG-4 compressed digital video. The new technology may also accelerate an industry trend toward smaller disk drives that consume less energy, or lead to more data-intensive applications, IBM said. In the past decade, the data density for magnetic hard drives has doubled every 18 months. Since 1997, it's been doubling every year. Until the ``pixie dust'' coating breakthrough, scientists said they faced a design barrier they thought would halt progress. Source: http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/ap/20010521/tc/ibm_storage_breakthrough.html I.B.M. to Announce Expansion of Data-Density Storage LimitBy JOHN MARKOFF Researchers at the company's Almaden Research Center in San Jose, Calif., say they have been able to reach far beyond a frontier known as the superparamagnetic limit — a point at which the tiny magnetic areas that store ones and zeros on the rotating platters used in computer hard disks become unstable. The company also plans to announce on Monday that it has already begun using the new technology in the manufacture of its most recent advanced disk drives, which began shipping several weeks ago. Those disks are shipping as part of its Travelstar product line of notebook hard disks, and they have now reached densities of up to 25.7 billion bits a square inch. At this density, I.B.M.'s highest- capacity drives can store 48 billion bytes of data. But company officials said that the new magnetic materials technology introduced with the Travelstar line would enable I.B.M. to increase disk density to 100 billion bits a square inch as soon as 2003. Such a density achievement would make it possible for the company to manufacture a version of its tiny one-inch Microdrive that would store six billion bytes of information, compared with its current capacity of up to one billion bytes. It will also be possible to build desktop drives capable of storing 400 billion bytes of data and portable drives capable of storing 200 billion bytes. Such a portable drive could hold the equivalent of 42 DVD's worth of data. Underlying the remarkable densities is an exotic technique used to deposit an ultrathin layer of ruthenium, a precious metal similar to platinum, between two layers of magnetic material. The resulting sandwich, in which the ruthenium layer is just three atoms thick, is sufficient to create an effect known as antiferromagnetic coupling, or AFC, in which a stronger and more stable electronic field is created than with conventional single-layer magnetic materials. The AFC effect is already used in the manufacture of the tiny magnetic sensor that reads data from a rotating disk by sensing minute changes in magnetic field strength that are represented by digital ones and zeros in computer language. But I.B.M. executives said that the company was leading the industry in introducing the new technology in the manufacture of the disk platters themselves. "The pace of this technology is now moving remarkably rapidly," said
Currie Munce, who holds the dual positions of director for Hard Disk Drive
Technology at I.B.M.'s Storage Technology Indeed, the increase in density within the disk drive industry has outpaced the legendary rate of Moore's Law that has marked the rate of the advance of the semiconductor industry since the late 1960's. While the density of transistors has been doubling every 18 months since 1997, in the storage industry, density has been doubling every 12 months. Mr. Munce said he thought that the storage industry would be able to stay on this pace until about 2007. Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/21/technology/21DISK.html ************ IBM PRESS RELEASE ***********
Source: http://www.ibm.com/Press/prnews.nsf/jan/F8DE74C08688375E85256A5300483B8F |
|
www.skfriends.com
|
|