[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Guess not all of the links at the bottom of the article work...here is the one that seems relevant:

Fujitsu hails HDD capacity breakthrough

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By Tony Smith [More by this author]

25th January 2007 11:37 GMT

Fujitsu has developed a technique it claims will allow the company to produce hard drives with an areal data density of 1Tb per square inch - almost seven times the density of today's latest perpendicular-recording hard drives.

Fujitsu's approach is based on what the company calls 'patterned media'. Essentially, the technique uses anodised aluminium to create a pattern of holes, each holding a portion of magnetic material used to store a single bit of data. The aluminium-oxide surrounding these so-called 'nanoholes' helps magnetically insulate each bit from all the others, preventing one from affecting another, which might lead to data corruption.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

fyi

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

And:

WD claims highest hard drive density crown

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By Tony Smith [More by this author]

18th October 2007 13:28 GMT

Western Digital has claimed to have created the world's highest density hard drive platter, a unit that packs in 520Gb per inch squared - more than double the highest density products on the market today.

They typically offer an data density of 200Gbpi² - just not enough to yield the 640GB-per-platter storage capacity needed to yield 3.5in hard drive capacities of 3TB, WD said.

Interestingly, WD said it had demonstrated the higher areal density using a Tunneling Magneto-Resistive (TMR) read/write head of the kind Hitachi this week said wouldn't be up to the tasks of reading data off a 500Gbpi² platter. Hitachi made that claim when it announced its putative successor head technology, Current Perpendicular-to-the-Plane Giant Magneto-Resistive (CPP-GMR).

For its part, WD said its latest development showed "the extendibility of TMR head technology generations into the future".

WD said it expects 3TB drives to go on sale in 2010, but curiously it based that forecast on "on the industry's current density growth rate of more than 40 per cent per year" rather than when it expects to be able to bring its 520Gbpi² platters to market. Will the two coincide? Only a few years to wait to find out...

In January this year, Fujitsu said it had developed the technique that will allow it to create drives with an areal density of 1Tbpi². It too reckons it will be able to offer HDDs of that density in 2010.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Fry's has the Seagate 1 Terabyte Drive with 32 MB buffer on sale this weekend for $199...Limit 2 per customer.

Sale ends Tuesday...

[Quix]

In terms of such technologies . . . I’m just an ignorant layman silly rabbit shrink . . .

But I’ve long wondered . . . .

Why wouldn’t it be possible . . . to construct read/write heads that were . . . say on 4 or more arms and slightly changed in alignment to deal with the spiral data or change the spiral data to nonspiral . . . Seems like such could be faster and remove the issue of crashing flying heads if the read/write were embedded in a solid disc slightly above the data disc.

or

even have solid state read/write sensors above the data disc that populated bit points equal to the bit points of the data disc . . . or maybe a read disc below and write disc above??

I’m sure there must be vast technical reasons such is undoable but I’ve long been curious so thought I’d ask this talented group.

But now we have flash drives advancing . . . and holographic crystal storage looming . . . ?? Right?

[mkjessup]

You want a monster drive?
I'll give ya a monster drive!:

[July 4th]

It's about time. :)

I need about about 5TB to store all of my DVD and Blu-Ray discs as images, so I'm hoping to see major leaps in storage technology. It would be great to have everything on-demand.

[bmwcyle]

ping

[RightWhale]

Of interest?

[ThePythonicCow]

Reposting, with links and formatting refined a tad:

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Mystery HDD maker orders kit to build monster-capacity drives

By Tony Smith

18th April 2008 12:27 GMT

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.

Patterned media nanoholes

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.

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.

Related stories

• Seagate lawsuit targets solid-state drive maker
• Fujitsu fetes 'first' 320GB, 7200rpm laptop drive
• WD claims highest hard drive density crown
• Fujitsu creates readable, writeable 'nanohole' hard drive
• Fujitsu hails HDD capacity breakthrough
• Canon looks to nanoholes to drive up storage densities

[ShadowAce]

[papasmurf]

Hitachi?

[tubebender]

I don't know knuttin about HDD Mr Ernest but I risked my life on the streets of Eureka today looking a Vanilla flavored 5 disc CD player for our church and came up short unless I want to hit the "thrift stores"

btw...and this is just a guess but I'll bet HDD is not Hillary Deficit Disorder?