Chances are that this text that you are reading now was retrieved from
a hard drive.
I think it was the late
Al Shugart, who co-founded Seagate, who once
said that he believed that the hard disk drive industry was the "hardest
business in the world".
In an article today by Amy Nordrum at the IEEE Spectrum Magazine website,
she reports on how rivals Seagate and Western Digital have split on which
technology to use in order to squeeze more capacity out of hard drives.
Quote:
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Originally Posted by Amy Nordrum, IEEE Spectrum
For most of the past 50 years, the areal density of hard disks—a measure of how many bits of data that engineers can squeeze into a given area—increased by an average of nearly 40 percent each year. Lately, though, that rate has slowed to around 10 percent. Everyone who works on magnetic storage is well aware of this problem, but only in the past year or so have executives from Seagate Technology and Western Digital, the leading manufacturers of hard drives, very publicly split on how to solve it. In back-to-back announcements in October 2017, Western Digital pledged to begin shipping drives based on what is known as microwave-assisted magnetic recording (MAMR) in 2019, and Seagate said it would have drives that incorporate heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) on the market by 2020.
If one company’s solution proves superior, it will reshape a US $24 billion industry and set the course for a decade of advances in magnetic storage.
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Quote:
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Originally Posted by Amy Nordrum, IEEE Spectrum
Inside a drive, a motor spins the hard disk at between about 5,000 and 11,000 revolutions per minute. And just 2 nanometers above the disk hovers the component that Seagate and Western Digital vehemently disagree on how to remake: the read/write head. This head produces its own magnetic field, using it to flip the magnetic orientation of grains as needed to write a 0 or a 1. A sensor on the head reads data back by measuring fluctuations in the magnetic field above a disk as it flies over clusters of grains.
Over time, designers have made these grains smaller and smaller, which allows more bits to be stored in the same area on the disk. But to store even more, the grains would have to become so small that ambient thermal energy could cause them to flip spontaneously, wiping out the data they held.
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Article here :-
https://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/...gnetic-storage