IBM technology quadruples disk space
By Deni Connor
Network World Fusion, 05/21/01
IBM is developing a technology that it says will
quadruple the capacity of a disk drive and
dramatically increase the amount of data that can
be stored on disk.
The company is adding a new type of magnetic
coating, called ruthenium, to its current disk
drives. The ruthenium is layered between the two
magnetic layers of the disk platter. IBM refers to
ruthenium as "pixie dust," but it is also known as
antiferromagnetically coupled (AFC) media. The
technology can be implemented without
redesigning current disk drive plants, IBM claims.
By 2003, each disk drive made with AFC
technology will be able to store 100G bits per
square inch, the company says. The technology
is most likely to be used first in notebook hard disks, although it should eventually
move across all IBM product lines. Shipping implementations contain up to 25.7G
bits per square inch.
The technology is expected to be helpful for storing digital music[\u], presentations and
videos, while consuming less memory, IBM says. The company claims that within 2
years, 100G-bit density would allow 400G-byte desktop drives, 200G-byte notebook
drives and 6G-byte or 13 hours of MPEG-4 compressed digital video in handheld
devices, the equivalent of eight movies.
Magnetic hard drive density doubled every 18 months through 1996; since 1998, it
has doubled every 12 months.
The company says it will be sharing the technology with other vendors.
IBM is at www.ibm.com
