News

posted on 15 August 2008 15:59

Continuing its un-Hitachi-like habit of being open about future technologies Hitachi GST researchers and others have demonstrated terabit per square inch areal densities using patterned media.

This is the media side of the coin needed to complete the future hard drive picture provided by Hitachi GST's revealing it hopes TMR heads will take us from today's 250Gbit/ in² to upwards of 610Gbit/in² by 2011 and then expects CPP-GMR heads to provide areal densities in the 500 - 1000Gbit/in² by 2013 or so.

The patterned media was worked on by University of Wisconsin researchers alongside the Hitachi GST team. They apparently used existing lithographic tools to pattern magnetic domains after which a self-assembling block co-polymer was added to divide each track into quarters.

^{To confuse everyone but chemists ... Wikipedia says "A heteropolymer or copolymer is a polymer derived from two (or more) monomeric species, as opposed to a homopolymer where only one monomer is used. Copolymerization refers to methods used to chemically synthesize a copolymer." Now that that has been explained we can continue ...}

The technique is called density multiplication and theoretically can produce a terabit areal density hard drive. The Hitachi GST researchers will attempt to do this and build a hard drive with 1Tbit/in² areal density using this technique. They will also try to go further and surpass 1Tbit/in².

By building a disk with 1Tbit/in² patterned media and CPP-GMR heads capable of reading them Hitachi hopes to build a 5TB 3.5-inch disk drive by 2013 or thereabouts.

More here.

^{[Chris Mellor.]}