We all thought that HDD would eventually go slowly into the night when SSD came down in price enough, but two existing technologies can be combined to create vastly bigger disks.
The two technologies in question are Thermally-assisted Magnetic Recording (TAR) and Bit-patterned Recording (BPR). Both are very complex, but basically TAR heats micro areas of a drive space during the writing process and the latter isolates written data into tiny ‘magnetic islands’.
Both methods are designed to avoid ‘superparamagnetism’ which is a troublesome by product of ever more densely filled drives whereby written data can bleed from one part of the drive to other nearby sectors corrupting their information.
The clever part are the flaws in TAR (micro heating an area with enough accuracy) and BPR (the need for very specific materials) cancel one another out because BPR makes TAR more accurate and TAR’s heating preps drive areas so the specialised materials aren’t required.
The result was testing which showed densities of up to 1TB per square inch (compared to the few hundred GB on today’s drives) and that it has the potential to step up to 10TB per square inch. The limitation is speed with the process currently restricted to 250 megabits per second (about 30MB).
On the flip side, with TAR and BPR both known technologies, the hope is getting drives onto market that use their hybrid benefits won’t take too long (though no timeframe was mentioned).
Via Artstechnica
