H.A.M.R : Storage Futurity

1. In the last 15 years of my interaction with various modes of storage medias right from the days of floppy drives,tape drives,CDs,DVDs and now Blue Ray's,we have all witnessed as to how the storage is shrinking and shrinking and shrinking...(reminds of the ascent of dharmender paaji saying daru peeing and peeing and peeing...from Sholay)...khair this is not the intented aim here.

2. A new buzz word in the future storage trends has come up in the name of H.A.M.R....briefed below.

3. Heat-assisted magnetic recording ie HAMR is a technology that magnetically records data on high-stability media using laser thermal assistance to first heat the material. HAMR takes advantage of high-stability magnetic compounds such as iron platinum alloy. These materials can store single bits in a much smaller area without being limited by the same superparamagnetic effect that limits the current technology used in hard disk storage. The only catch being that they must be heated to apply the changes in magnetic orientation. HAMR was developed by Fujitsu in 2006 so that it could achieve one terabit per square inch densities.

4. Seagate Technology said it had successfully demonstrated the principles behind HAMR, the name for the technology that could form the basis of Seagate's next-generation hard drives. The successful demonstration doesn't mean that the technology is right around the corner as the roadmap calls for HAMR to be introduced in about five or six years.

5. If the technology lives up to its promises, however, then HAMR could blow away the "superparamagnetic limit" by about a factor of 100, according to Seagate. The company hopes to read and write 50 terabits (6.25 terabytes) of data in a square inch using low-cost manufacturing techniques.

6. Thanks Wiki and Seagate for info.