New Hard Drives May Turn Handhelds Into Tiny TiVos
Mike Langberg, 03.26.04, 4:59 PM ET
Apple Computer can't keep up with demand for its iPod mini digital music player, built around a 4-gigabyte hard drive that's just one inch in diameter.
So imagine the waiting list in six years, when the iPod mini's hard drive will hold 55 gigabytes of songs -- enough to play for 39 days non-stop without repeating a single track.
This isn't speculation. The humble hard drive, invented in 1956 by IBM engineers working in downtown San Jose, has a clear technology road map that shows continuing massive increases in capacity.
At a meeting of the American Physical Society in Montreal on Thursday, industry and university researchers discussed "Ultimate Limits to Data Storage."
Those limits aren't what they used to be. Ten years ago, researchers were worried hard drives for desktop PCs would top out at about 20 gigabytes. Now, new technology just about to enter production will boost desktop drives to about 2 terabytes -- or 2,000 gigabytes -- around 2010.
And even more advanced technologies, which don't have all the kinks worked out yet, could boost the iPod mini to 3 terabytes in 2020 and give the typical desktop PC an awesome 86-terabyte drive.
Better yet, the cost of hard drives is expected to stay constant as capacity soars.
To understand how this is happening, I spoke this week with three insiders: Mark Kryder, chief technology officer of Seagate Technology in Scotts Valley; Currie Munce, vice president of Hitachi Global Storage Technologies in San Jose; and Mark Geenen, president of the International Disk Drive Equipment and Materials Association in Sunnyvale.
The first important technology transition, they explained, is about two years away.
Hard disks are built around spinning platters coated with very fine magnetic particles. A recording head on a pivot swings over the particles, changing their magnetic field to represent the ones and zeroes of digital data. Most of the increase in hard-disk capacity comes from crowding those particles closer and closer together.
Think of crowded rush-hour subways in Tokyo, where harried conductors shove reluctant commuters into tightly packed cars. At a certain point, there's a physical limit to how many bodies can squeeze together.
Today's hard drives use a system called longitudinal recording where the particles are, in effect, laid down sideways. It's as if the subway commuters were lying down on the floor.
The new technology is called perpendicular recording and, as the name implies, stacks the particles vertically so they can be packed much closer together.
Longitudinal recording can't go beyond a factor of two or three in additional density, so today's biggest desktop hard drive at 400 gigabytes would top out at about 1 terabyte in about two years.
Perpendicular recording, on the other hand, should be able to deliver 10 to 15 times more density, so the 120 gigabyte drive grows to almost 2 terabytes when perpendicular production methods are fully developed around 2010.
But that's not the end of the road. Hitachi (nyse: HIT - news - people ), which acquired IBM (nyse: IBM - news - people )'s disk-drive business last year, and Seagate (nyse: STX - news - people ) are working on a next-generation technology using lasers. Thermally assisted magnetic recording, as it's called, relies on a microscopic laser in the hard disk's head to briefly heat particles when writing data.
This overcomes a basic problem: As particles are packed ever closer, their magnetic fields can interfere with each other and make it impossible to accurately read or write data. The laser's heat allows the head to switch the setting on particles with very low magnetic fields -- so more particles can cram onto a platter.
At the Montreal meeting, a Seagate scientist said thermally assisted magnetic recording could go beyond perpendicular recording by another factor of 10.
Kryder, Munce and Geenen cautioned that, so far, thermally assisted magnetic recording only works on research lab test benches.
"You don't have all the issues solved," said Seagate's Kryder. "But my confidence level is pretty high."
There are more ideas now being tested, including reducing the size of a hard disk's particles all the way down to individual molecules. This is still somewhat in the realm of science fiction, but could someday yield hard drives with 3,500 times more capacity than today's models.
"Disk drive makers are almost pinching themselves with glee because the demand curve has never looked better," said Geenen of IDEMA.
What's exciting isn't the opportunity to store several million Microsoft (nasdaq: MSFT - news - people ) Word documents on a computer's hard drive. Instead, it's the whole new categories of consumer electronics that high-capacity hard drives will create.
Almost every device we use for electronic communication, information or entertainment could soon have a hard drive. Your cell phone will become a tiny TiVo (nasdaq: TIVO - news - people ), storing many hours of low-resolution video; hand-held digital music players may come pre-loaded with thousands of hours of music, which you would pay to unlock; camcorders could hold hundreds of hours of DVD-quality video, eliminating forever the worry about running out of tapes.
The business of making hard drives is so brutally competitive that analysts estimate the industry as a whole has lost money during the past 30 years. It's not certain the new technologies will change that. I'm just grateful so many people have been willing to work so long for so little reward, while giving the rest of us such wonderful tools for building the future.
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