3GScottishUser
5th April 2005, 08:58 PM
From BBC News (05/04/2005):
Tiny drives set for space boost
Hard drives for mobiles and other portable gadgets could store up to a terabyte of data in the next few years, using a century-old recording process.
Hitachi has said it can fit 230 gigabits of data per square inch on a disk using "perpendicular recording"
The storage industry currently makes hard drives using longitudinal recording, which is reaching its limit.
Hitachi's work means we could see one-inch hard drives holding 60GB instead of up to 10GB currently.
One terabyte is the equivalent of 1,024GB - enough to hold more than 240,000 songs at the standard encoding rate for digital music files.
Perpendicular recording was pioneered by the late 19th century work of Danish scientist Valdemar Poulsen, who demonstrated magnetic recording with his telegraphone.
Consumers' demand for storing more data on smaller devices has provided a strong impetus for us to pursue perpendicular recording with a greater sense of urgency
Jun Naruse, Hitachi
He is widely thought to have been the first to experiment with magnetically recorded sound using perpendicular methods.
The technology industry wants smaller hard drives that hold more information to go into all kinds of digital devices like portable music players.
Storage prices
As storage prices come down and data capacity increases, more portable devices are coming out with built-in hard drives, such as music and media players from Apple, Creative Labs, Archos, iRiver and others.
Jun Naruse, chief of Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, said the industry was on the "cusp of the most significant hard drive technology transition of the past decade".
"Consumers' demand for storing more data on smaller devices has provided a strong impetus for us to pursue perpendicular recording with a greater sense of urgency," he said.
Last month, Samsung unveiled its first i300 mobile, for instance, with a 3GB internal hard drive for storing MP3 tracks and images.
Analysts predicts that the number of hard drives in consumer electronics gadgets could grow from 17 million in 2003 to 55 million in 2006.
Conventionally, the industry has used a technique called longitudinal recording.
With this method, bits of data are arranged horizontally on the recording medium.
But there are limits to this process, which are fast being approached.
The biggest problem hard drive technology faces is what is called the superparamagnetic effect.
Magnetic grains
This is when microscopic magnetic grains on the disk get so tiny that they interfere with one another.
Often this results in reduced ability to hold their magnetic orientations. When this happens, bits of data can become corrupt.
Perpendicular recording methods overcomes the problem and aligns data bits vertically, perpendicular to the disk.
Tiny drives set for space boost
Hard drives for mobiles and other portable gadgets could store up to a terabyte of data in the next few years, using a century-old recording process.
Hitachi has said it can fit 230 gigabits of data per square inch on a disk using "perpendicular recording"
The storage industry currently makes hard drives using longitudinal recording, which is reaching its limit.
Hitachi's work means we could see one-inch hard drives holding 60GB instead of up to 10GB currently.
One terabyte is the equivalent of 1,024GB - enough to hold more than 240,000 songs at the standard encoding rate for digital music files.
Perpendicular recording was pioneered by the late 19th century work of Danish scientist Valdemar Poulsen, who demonstrated magnetic recording with his telegraphone.
Consumers' demand for storing more data on smaller devices has provided a strong impetus for us to pursue perpendicular recording with a greater sense of urgency
Jun Naruse, Hitachi
He is widely thought to have been the first to experiment with magnetically recorded sound using perpendicular methods.
The technology industry wants smaller hard drives that hold more information to go into all kinds of digital devices like portable music players.
Storage prices
As storage prices come down and data capacity increases, more portable devices are coming out with built-in hard drives, such as music and media players from Apple, Creative Labs, Archos, iRiver and others.
Jun Naruse, chief of Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, said the industry was on the "cusp of the most significant hard drive technology transition of the past decade".
"Consumers' demand for storing more data on smaller devices has provided a strong impetus for us to pursue perpendicular recording with a greater sense of urgency," he said.
Last month, Samsung unveiled its first i300 mobile, for instance, with a 3GB internal hard drive for storing MP3 tracks and images.
Analysts predicts that the number of hard drives in consumer electronics gadgets could grow from 17 million in 2003 to 55 million in 2006.
Conventionally, the industry has used a technique called longitudinal recording.
With this method, bits of data are arranged horizontally on the recording medium.
But there are limits to this process, which are fast being approached.
The biggest problem hard drive technology faces is what is called the superparamagnetic effect.
Magnetic grains
This is when microscopic magnetic grains on the disk get so tiny that they interfere with one another.
Often this results in reduced ability to hold their magnetic orientations. When this happens, bits of data can become corrupt.
Perpendicular recording methods overcomes the problem and aligns data bits vertically, perpendicular to the disk.