Mystery HDD maker orders kit to build monster-capacity drives

Hard drives could experience a massive increase in capacity next year now that a "major" HDD maker has placed an order for equipment to mass-produce 'patterned media' drives.

Earlier this week, Malmö, Sweden-based fabrication-equipment maker Obducat announced it had reached an agreement with "a major player in th HDD industry" to supply the unnamed company with up to SKR66m ($11.13m) worth of lithography hardware.

Obducat will provide the mystery vendor with a "production-ready" Sindre lithography machine, used to create the high data-density surfaces used by the new drive technology. More equipment orders may follow, the Swedish firm said.

Fujitsu is a possible candidate for the HDD maker behind the Obducat deal - it has worked on patterned media technology since 2005. Canon was working on the technology in the early years of the decade and continues to do so, but it's not a major hard drive maker.

The technique involves establishing microscopic 'nanoholes' within a sheet of aluminium oxide. The holes form a pattern, hence the name.

Each hole is filled with a magnetic material, each holding a single data bit. The surrounding oxide insulates each hole from its neighbours, preventing data corruption.

The holes are so small, they can only be created using the lithography techniques employed to make microprocessors and other chips.

Obducat claims its Sindre systems have been used to create holes as small at 17nm in diameter - not far short of the 13nm that Fujitsu last year reckoned was required to yield an areal density of 1TB per square inch.

That compares with the 65GB per square inch record claimed by Western Digital back in October 2007 - and even that's higher than the 25GB per square inch density of typical HDDs.

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Obducat said its customer will take delivery of the first Sindre litho systems in "the first half of 2009". The machines are designed to work on 4, 6 or 8in wafers and, Obducat claims, can churn out discs at a rate of up to 30 per hour.

Yields are another matter, of course, but the company has the best part of a year to work on that, with further tweaking once its customer gets the systems in place. Another major challenge is getting the nanoholes into the precise order needed for read/write heads to access their contents efficiently.

Speaking of Miniscribe....

MiniScribe was a manufacturer of disk storage products, founded in Longmont, Colorado in 1980.

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MiniScribe designed and sold stepper motor-based hard disks with a large amount of onboard intelligence for the time, eventually moving into higher-profile voice coil motor designs before going bankrupt in 1990, and subsequently being purchased by Maxtor. MiniScribe’s failure centered on one of the first major accounting scandals in the computer industry; after losing a supply contract with IBM's PC division in 1985, MiniScribe falsified its sales records for several years before being discovered in 1989.

The primary scandal erupted in the final weeks of 1989, when after failing to procure short-term financing, the company executives decided to embark upon a fraudulent course of action to bring in the financing unwittingly from their customers. As each unit sold was tracked via serial numbers and also sat uninspected for some weeks inside warehouses in Singapore awaiting use in production, the decision was made to ship pieces of masonry inside the boxes that would normally contain hard drives. After receiving payment, Miniscribe then planned to issue a recall of all the affected serial numbers and then ship actual hard drive units as replacements, using the money received to meet financial obligations in the short term.

Astoundingly, Miniscribe embarked upon a round of layoffs just before their Christmas shutdown, including several of the employees that were involved in the packaging and shipping of the masonry. These people immediately called the Denver area newspapers, which broke the story during the holiday season. Following immediate investigations in Singapore and in Colorado the fraud was confirmed. Miniscribe lawyers filed for bankruptcy within minutes of the start of business on January 2, 1990.

Miniscribe is frequently called "Brand X Brick Shippers" in Colorado.

I'd like to have about 50TB so I would have a central location to store all of my VMs at work.

If Fujitsu can do the spec'd density, you just might get it.

I invented RAID-5 (simultaneously with Patterson, et al) at the MN Supercomputer Center in 1986. We used rows of IBM 3380 DASDs hooked to an IBM mainframe acting as a NAS for a pair of CRAY-2s. Each DASD cabinet was 7ft high and 30ft long. The platters were 170GB total, cost circa $2 million.

Today you can buy the same capacity with better speed for $60.

I invented RAID-5 (simultaneously with Patterson, et al) at the MN Supercomputer Center in 1986.

So you're the one! ;^)

I worked on a bunch of Arrays of 3380D and E style drives for IP Sharp's APL at a large company between '81-'87. They never took any downtime or lost any transactions, other than CP or power failures. Amazing thing is -- I have more computing power in my home office than they had in that whole room except for the network, tapes and printers. Scarey to imagine what's ahead for my kids, considering I thought the first Ball Point Pen to be a great leap.

You probably have something still running with an ST-225, hooked up to a WD RLL controller to get another 10MB out of it.

Ahhh, the old 20MB Seagates... From before when Seagate "sabotaged" their MFM drives so they wouldn't run reliably with RLL controllers... My first PC Style computer was an Everex Step 20 386. At the time, it was the fastest Intel based system out there... I put in a WD1006V-SR2 RLL controller, a Seagate 4096 (80MB drive, but 120MB RLL) and a Mitsubishi MR-535 65MB drive. Nobody could figure out why I wanted 180MB in a desktop system! But I needed it for working with the SCO Xenix development system AND Informix, as well as making a dual boot system that let me run MS Dos or SCO Xenix.

Mark

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