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Fujitsu announces technology for future hard drive capacity expansion

Fujitsu of America announced another advancement in its research of magnetic recording. Using patterned media technology, Fujitsu was able to achieve a one-dimensional array nanohole pattern with a 25 nanometer pitch. This process could one day enable one terabit per square inch recording on HDDs. Fujitsu also revealed a new development involving perpendicular magnetic recording read/write operation on random patterned media. With this technology, the soft underlayer is used as the PMR media, another important milestone.

A density of one terabit per square inch is about five times greater than the current drive technology on the market. Applying a one terabit areal density figure to today’s drive sizes would give us 3.5” drives capable of storing 5TB or 2.5” notebook drives holding 1.5TB.

Fujitsu first announced innovations with patterned media recording in June 2005. At that time, advancements were made with the introduction of a process to pre-pit aluminum media, resulting in nanoholes with an extremely dense and ordered structure. In addition, a technique called land/groove texturing allowed for the creation of discrete tracks in which the nanoholes could be formed. This progress in patterned media has enabled the development of high capacity hard disk drives, especially in smaller form factors.

This progress in patterned media recording closely follows the November 2006 Fujitsu announcement regarding the optical element being developed for thermal assisted recording, another promising advancement for future capacity increases.

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Large 2.5 inch drives
By kuyaglen on 1/24/2007 11:45:51 AM , Rating: 2
Having Fujitsu provide high capacity drives also would benefit the consumer since now there would be 3 large drive (1+TB) manufacturers to choose from, when there was 2 (Seagate, Hitachi).

I have a 3.1TB fileserver that has a lot of unorganized files, that I would be able to copy onto an external 2.5" drive, plug it into my work pc and and find my down time more productive (for me at least). And reducing the number of drives from 12x3.5" to 3x2.5" drives would help on size/noise/head/power.




RE: Large 2.5 inch drives
By dice1111 on 1/24/2007 12:50:18 PM , Rating: 2
Your HDD's give out "head"? Lucky guy...


RE: Large 2.5 inch drives
By kuyaglen on 1/24/2007 6:04:22 PM , Rating: 2
whoops, I meant "heat". I guess you can tell what 1/3 of my file server is for.


By patentman on 1/24/2007 12:28:51 PM , Rating: 2
Nanodot media has been around for a while, even will before 2005.

Proof: See http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn6362

I posted the following comment regaridng the linked article on the Anandtech forums under the name klaviernista at around the same time the article was posted (typos corrected):

"I examine patent applications for magentic media at the patent and trademark office. The problem you are describing has been around for a long time, as has so called "nanodot" media. This problem is called "intergranular exchange coupling" and contributes to increased noise in high density magnetic media.

This problem arose as a result of the industry striving towards increased recording density. One way to get increased recording density is to reduce the size of the grains in magnetic layer (Basically, 1 grain=1 bit, so more grains = more bits per square inch). The problem with this is that as you reduce grain size, the coercivity (basically the strength by which a magnetic domain is held in a fixed direction) decreases. In other words, the orientation of each domain in each bit becomes more susceptible to being influenced by external magnetic fields. Well, as each grain is magnetic and the coercivity of each grain is low at small grain sizes, the magnetic field of each grain impacts the orientation of the domain in each surrounding grain. As a result, the noise of the media is increased.

Industry has come up with a variety of ways to combat this problem. the most common way to prevent or reduce this type of coupling is to introduce Cr into the magnetic layer. Cr only has a certain solubilty in the crystalline lattice of a Co alloy (Co is the most common element used for the magentic layers in magentic media). When the CoCr magnetic layer is formed, it is first deposited (via sputtering or cvd) and then annealed. As a result of the annealing step, excess Cr segregates from within the crystalline grain into the area between adjacent grains (called the grain boundary). By controlling the amount of Cr which segregates, the spacing between grains is controlled. As you probably know, magnetic field intensity decreases as the distance from its origin increases. Thus, the influence of each grain's magnetic field on surrounding grains is substantially reduced by the introduction of Cr into the grain boundary. In addition, non-magentic oxides such as SiO2 and TiO2 have also been used to segregate grains.

So, with nanodot media and quantum dot media, it is likely that some form of segregant will be utilized to separate each dot, or the dots themselves will be spaced apart when they are deposited so as to minimize this type of grain coupling. Many quantum dot media are formed by self assembly methods, so control over spacing between each dot can usually be controlled realtively easily."

later in the same thread, I posted the following comment:

"Oh, and the article states something to the effect of: these researchers have created 5nm nickel dots, which are about 10 times smaller then those previously produced. It shouold read "those previously produced, by them." I personally worked on a project at the Naval Research Laboratory a number of years (note, this project took place from 1996-1999) back where I used a reverse micelle synthesis technique to fabricate spherical 3 nm Iron Oxide (superparamagnetic) and 11nm FePt (ferromagnetic) nanoparticles. Further, the use of the reverse micelle technique to create magnetic nanoparticles on the scale asserted by these researchers has been known since the early 90's, and the potential use of these particles as memory has been around since the mid 90's as well. So to me there is nothing really new about wehat these guys have done.

I'm not trying ot sound arrogant, I'm just letting you know that this isn't really new is all. Still interesting tech though. "

FOr other interesting articles about nanodots and their potentioal use in memory, see the patent and non-patent literature of Dr. Everett Carpenter, who to my knowledge is still a researcher at the Naval Research Lab.




By dice1111 on 1/24/2007 12:48:00 PM , Rating: 2
No where in the article does it says it's new Nanodot tech, just a new application for Fujitsu as a company to increase density.

Thank you for the exausting and irrelivent post.


By patentman on 1/24/2007 12:53:54 PM , Rating: 2
Read the title of the article: "Fujitsu Makes Advancement in Hard Drive Density"

Now read the title again.... Fujitsu makes "ADVANCEMENT." My post above indicates that did no such thing. All Fujitsu did was announce that they have a potential commercial product, yet the article makes it sound like they invented nanodot media. This is far from true.

"In addition, a technique called land/groove texturing allowed for the creation of discrete tracks in which the nanoholes could be formed"

Land groove texturing is EXTREMELY old technology, yet the article implies that it is the bees knees of nanodot media. Hell, land/groove is based on the exact same technology as the manufacturing techniques for optical CD's.

Thank you for your ignorant and uneducated post.


Did I miss a timeframe
By PAPutzback on 1/24/2007 9:20:16 AM , Rating: 2
How long before wee see this tech. It seems to have shown up just in time for the newly cracked HD formats. We will be able to continue our online storage of movies.




RE: Did I miss a timeframe
By patentman on 1/24/2007 12:48:21 PM , Rating: 2
It didn't just show up. Its been around a long time. I'd say we could see the 1st commercial nanodot drivces as soon as a year from now, as far as five years.


the question is.....
By ncage on 1/24/2007 9:10:02 AM , Rating: 1
Are the going to make consumer desktop hard drives again. It would great great if they did. I always liked their desktop hard drives. Unfortunatly i think they left the desktop space because of tight margins. I hope they return...




RE: the question is.....
By patentman on 1/24/2007 12:47:36 PM , Rating: 2
Fujitsu does a lot of reasearch in magentic recording media. They just license their tech to other companies for the development of consumer products nowadays.


Good news
By shaw on 1/24/2007 12:14:16 PM , Rating: 2
Definately good news, but I wont get excited until Fujitsu announces a release date on a hard drive using the technology.




It's all about how you look at it
By dagamer34 on 1/24/2007 1:39:33 PM , Rating: 2
Either:
a) Higher density means more hard drive space for the same amount of money

OR

b) Less money need to buy the same out of hard drive space.




So what
By jaybuffet on 1/24/07, Rating: -1
RE: So what
By PAPutzback on 1/24/2007 9:24:02 AM , Rating: 2
I have 1.5 terabyte of space with about 1.3 used up in video, music, photos and game downloads. MS wouldn't be coming out with Windows Home server for the average Joe if only a small percentage of users were using less than 200 gigs of space.


RE: So what
By soydeedo on 1/24/2007 9:39:06 AM , Rating: 3
exactly. with the way things are headed consumers are going to be relying on an htpc type setup and once some of these new movie download services come into play average joes really will need that kind of space.


RE: So what
By dice1111 on 1/24/2007 12:36:59 PM , Rating: 4
As long as DRM doesn't kill or control all our options and freedoms like the media companies want it to.


RE: So what
By MrDiSante on 1/24/2007 1:58:14 PM , Rating: 2
Agreed. I have a 320 GB HDD, with 100 gigs of that split up for OS's the remaining 200 GiB are about 1/2 full. And that's because I regularly end up backing up my media onto DVDs and deleting it. If I didn't I could easily fill up my HDD. So more storage for less is always a good thing - it's like money, you can never have too much.


RE: So what
By jaybuffet on 1/24/2007 5:45:50 PM , Rating: 2
This is why I asked what % of people. I doubt most of you are average users. So I wonder how much the average person uses.

Also, if the home user has a 1TB disk in their Windows Home Server, how do they back that up in case it crashes? Don't the larger disk sizes only create more problems when it comes to backing up? I don't think the avg user edits raw video footage. If they are editing video, more than likely it would be compressed i would think. Same thing with photos.

I mean, take a 200GB drive. HD video using WMV is about 8mbps (or 1MBps). So 130GB for video(~36hrs),20GB for photos (@ 5MB per photo that would give you about 4000), 40GB for music (230 CD's @ 320kbps), and 10 gb for OS.

The avg user i don't think is a gamer (at least not PC gamer)

I just wished they would put more focus on speed instead of size. It's like Intel back when it was trying to get the Ghz as high as possible. Thankfully, AMD made them reconsider.


RE: So what
By masher2 (blog) on 1/24/2007 10:22:55 AM , Rating: 5
> "What I want is faster hard drives, quicker access...."

Err, higher data densities mean faster hard drives. A denser platter increases bandwidth...and a dense platter can be made smaller without impacting capacity, which allows for faster access times as well.


RE: So what
By semo on 1/24/2007 11:27:10 AM , Rating: 3
let's not fool ourselves. performance gains from data densities are laughable and nothing like the performance bumps we see on a regular basis with other pc components.

white goods see more innovation than hdds.


RE: So what
By masher2 (blog) on 1/24/2007 11:45:49 AM , Rating: 5
> "let's not fool ourselves. performance gains from data densities are laughable..."

Is this a joke? Performance gains from areal density increases are by far the primary driver for increased hard drive performance. In the last 20 years, desktop drive head positioning speeds have barely increased, rotational speeds have doubled...but areal densities have increased by more than a thousandfold. They are very nearly the sole reason drives are so much faster today than in 1986.

Drive bandwidth is very nearly a linear function of areal density. Double the density, and you double the drive speed...assuming the electronics, of course, can keep up. That's nearly perfect scaling...and better than we get for transistors in CPUs now.

> "white goods see more innovation than hdds..."

Today's hard drives are 10,000 larger and 20,0000 faster than the drives of 20 years ago. If you define that as "lack of innovation", you need to redefine your terms.



RE: So what
By nurbsenvi on 1/24/2007 12:02:37 PM , Rating: 2
But I think hard disks are still quite slow and a bit of a bottleneck

I wish Hard disks were as fast as DDR SDRAMS...