RSSHitachi Scrambles to Prove It Can Beat Fujitsu to 1 Terabit HDDs
By Scott M. Fulton, III | Published October 15, 2007, 6:11 PM
In its regular prediction of future milestones at the opening of a major annual magnetic recording conference in Tokyo, Hitachi raised the bar yet again: This time, the company is promising to reach the one terabit per square inch milestone commercially by 2011. First, that might be too late to beat its competition; second, Hitachi may have to show more proof it can reach that goal even that soon.
The goal is a fairly simple one, and sometimes it has to be simple in order for engineers to be able to fathom all that's required of them bending the laws of physics to reach it. In the case of magnetic disk drive technologies, the problem is being able to store data magnetically in a space smaller than electrons themselves should typically allow for.
Last November, Fujitsu claimed it developed the technology that breaks through the barrier to reach the goal of one terabit per square inch (1 Tb/in2): an optical read head that enabled it to better spot where magnetic grains should be positioned. Then Fujitsu developed a way of using the colorization properties of oxidized aluminum to spot the locations of pits, or nanoholes.
Not one to be left in the dust in the quest for one terabit, Hitachi claimed today it has the formula to reach the magic areal density for commercial products by 2011. But part of its major technology announcement - the use of current perpendicular-to-the-plane giant magnetoresistive (CPP-GMR) heads, which Hitachi actually premiered at this same conference five years ago.
Back then, the goal was 300 Gb/in2 by 2006. As Hitachi itself admitted today -- one year past that benchmark -- it's only achieved two-thirds that number.
A US patent for Hitachi's CPP-GMR technology was issued in June 2006. But even then, it wasn't the first to the line. TDK's US patent for a very similar technology was issued in 2003.
So the question becomes, what is Hitachi ready to demonstrate for the Perpendicular Magnetic Recording Conference?
Here is where the details start to get as fuzzy as a crashed Iomega drive: Today, Hitachi says it's dumping traditional tunneling magnetoresistive heads, in favor of a CPP-GMR design that reduces electrical noise and also electrical signal, but in such a way that the signal-to-noise ratio goes up anyway.
The company is also saying that to meet its interim goal of implementing CPP-GMR by 2009, it will need to reduce track width from 70 nm to 50 nm, and then further to 30 nm by 2011. But Fujitsu's optical spotting and nanoholes technology introduced last November promises a 25 nm track width within that same time frame, and Fujitsu has shown some physical proof it can meet that goal.
Meanwhile, Hitachi appears to be scraping up interim innovations such as "damage-free fine patterning and noise suppression," which may be a fine polish on the surface. But engineers attending this week's Tokyo conference will expect Hitachi to put forth more than spit and polish.
It's a shame they have achieved such good research on optimizing platter based storage technology when new and innovating companies are changing the whole playing field.
Hard drives with moving parts WILL be superceded by solid state architecture.
Check the link below.
http://www.fusionio.com/
Obviously this kind of add on hardware will blow your budget, all new "toys" are very very expensive, but due to them being released december this year, i reckon we can be sure that 4 years down the track having one of these puppys would be standard.
What is paramount is that it allows us to leapfrog to a whole new spec.
"..almost a thousand times faster than any existing disk drive." - fusionio web FAQ
I can't wait...
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|+1
nothing more to say, just have a look at the performances we'll get soon.
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|Does it matter who gets there first? Eventually, they'll all get there. I have no freakin' idea who got to 1 GB first, or 100 GB. Seagate? WD? The now defunct IBM? Who cares if Hitachi or Fujitsu gets there first. More people will still buy Seagate or WD for one reason or another.
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|He who controls the Spice, controls the universe!
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|argh must get spice =)
btw.. im more interessted in who is first to launch a 1.2, 1.5, 1.7, 2 Tb HDD than something thats not here until 2011..
so how about when is there going to be a HDD that is >1 TB (>1024 Gb) formatted ??
Todays discs is *only* 931.51 Gb =)
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|What is Hitachi talking about, really ?
Seagate recently announced that they will get up to 300,000GB (300TB) HDUs by 2010 ...
http://www.theinquirer.n...drive-to-arrive-by-2010
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|Vista doesn't suck...
I have used ME, and it did suck, but Vista doesn't suck.
I have no issues and get better performance overall on Vista then I did with Windows XP.
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|That is strange, you would be one of the few and far between.
http://www.extremetech.c...2/0,1697,2096940,00.asp
http://www.anandtech.com...ems/showdoc.aspx?i=2917
http://techgage.com/arti...ing_performance_reports
I could see Vista 64 bit versus XP 32-bit, but otherwise I just don't believe you.
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|Runs fine for me too. On a Turion 64 with 1gig of ram and shared video memory actually.
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|1Gb of RAM? ah well at least you aren't trying to upgrade win95 to xp.
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|Are we still surprised that new OSs have higher requirements?
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|Apparently.
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|In the end, it's a contest of who has the biggest Microscope and fanciest tools.
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|Question is will they do the same tricks they do nowadays and advertise a 1TB drive but not in Usable space... The divisor between a terabit and a terabyte. ?? lets hope it will be a true advertising campaign and not a bait and switch for those that are ignorant of the difference.
Either way I look forward to large drive capacities.. In this day and age the bigger the better. I just would not want to have to defrag that sucker. lol
To be honest I think the drives of the future will be hybrid Solid state (for speed) and large terabit drives (for storage)... I think this is very probable within the next few years. That along with a new file system WinFS will be the key technology gap leap of faith... The question is Who will do it? MS or open source... My odds are MS will finally wake up to consumer wishes and make the business changes to make things work again... IE the underground slogan. Windows XP, It just works!
Seems there is a rule starting to go around with MS similar to ST movies. Every odd numbered OS sucks... 95, ME, Vista = sucked.
98SE, 2000, XP = Better then prior. IDK We will see...
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|There is no bait and switch. The drive manufacturers have always given the correct number per historical precedence. A gigabyte is an ambiguous amount. There have been lawsuits, but it's not as easy as changing terminology, as it would them be difficult to compare between drives of older/newer generations.
They should eventually pick a year, and switch to tebibytes as a new standard, and we'll all be on the same page forevermore.
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|No, once upon a time, hard drive manufacturers (anybody remember Shugart?) actually specified their capacities based on 1 MB = 1,048,576 bytes. That was when the market consisted solely of people who understood that digital computers were based on binary and so it was a given that these numbers would have to be powers of two.
It was only after the PC market became commoditized and started targeting ordinary consumers that the manufacturers "simplified" matters by defining a 1 MB = 1,000,000 bytes. Percentage-wise, it's off by more than 7% but it didn't really make that much difference in actual storage when 200 MB was still considered a big hard drive, but it set the precedence for continuing to simplify when capacities reached into hundreds of GB.
A proper GB is 1,073,741,824 bytes but the consumer marketing equivalent is 1,000,000,000 bytes. For a 250 GB hard drive, the difference is over 18,435,456,000 bytes. That's more than 17 GB (no matter how you define a GB).
Of course, this is all pointless because everybody knows you can't go back and fix consumer terminology once it has become popular. That's why we have cable "modems" that aren't really modems.
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|Yeah ive seen that these new 1 Tb drives are only 1000 Gb not 1024 :/
One can always hope that they change back to the proper way of measuring things.
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|cable modems ARE modems as they still modulate/demodulate the signal
"Cable modems use a range of frequencies originally intended to carry RF television channels. Multiple cable modems attached to a single cable can use the same frequency band, using a low-level media access protocol to allow them to work together within the same channel. Typically, 'up' and 'down' signals are kept separate using frequency division multiple access.
Broadband modems should still be classed as modems, since they use complex waveforms to carry digital data. They are more advanced devices than traditional dial-up modems as they are capable of modulating/demodulating hundreds of channels simultaneously."
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|haha well its just like the metric system all over again, do we go by feet, or inches? or meters? or miles or Kms, or? ahh.. distance is still distance, just with different mesurment labels..
thats all this is.. its still a hard driv, its still a size, just labled differently.
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