Seagate hits one terabit per sq. inches, compares self favorably to the Milky Way

Seagate (NASDAQ:STX) has become the first hard drive generate maker to achieve the landmark storage place solidity of 1 terabit (1 million bits) per sq. inches, producing a demonstration of the technological innovation that promises to twice the storage place potential of present-day challenging hard pushes upon its introduction later this decade and produce 3.5-inch challenging hard pushes with an extraordinary potential of up to 60 terabytes over the 10 decades that follow. The parts within a sq. inches of hard drive place, at the new landmark, far exceed stars in the Milky Way, which astronomers put between 200 million and 400 million.

"The progression of public networking, google, impair processing, wealthy press and other data-hungry programs constantly stoke need for ever higher storage place capacity"

Seagate reached the landmark information solidity with heat-assisted attractive producing (HAMR), the next-generation producing technological innovation. The current hard drive generate technological innovation, Perpendicular Magnetic Documenting (PMR), is used to record the array of digitized information – from music, photos, and video stored on home desktop and laptop PCs to business information housed in sprawling information centers – on the spinning platters inside every hard drive generate. PMR technological innovation was introduced in 2006 to replace longitudinal producing, a method in place since the advent of challenging hard pushes for computer storage place in 1956, and is expected to reach its potential restrict near 1 terabit per sq. inches in the next few decades.

"The progression of public networking, google, impair processing, wealthy press and other data-hungry programs constantly stoke need for ever higher storage place potential," said Mark Re, senior v. p. of Heads and Media Research and Development at Seagate. "Hard hard drive generate innovations like HAMR will be a key enabler of the progression of even more data-intense programs in the future, extending the ways businesses and consumers worldwide use, manage and store digital content."

Hard generate manufacturers increase areal solidity and potential by reducing a platter's information parts to pack more within each sq. inches of hard drive place. They also tighten the information tracks, the concentric circles on the disk's surface that anchor the parts. The key to areal solidity gains is to do both without disruptions to the bits' magnetization, a trend that can garble information. Using HAMR technological innovation, Seagate has achieved a linear bit solidity of about 2 million parts per inches, once thought impossible, resulting in a information solidity of just over 1 million parts, or 1 terabit, per sq. inches – 55 percent higher than present-day areal solidity ceiling of 620 gigabits per sq. inches.

The maximum potential of present-day 3.5-inch challenging hard pushes is 3 terabytes (TB), at about 620 gigabits per sq. inches, while 2.5-inch pushes top out at 750 gb (GB), or roughly 500 gigabits per sq. inches. The first creation of HAMR pushes, at just over 1 terabit per sq. inches, will likely more than twice these capacities – to 6TB for 3.5-inch pushes and 2TB for 2.5-inch models. The technological innovation offers a scale of potential progression never before possible, with a theoretical areal solidity restrict ranging from 5 to 10 terabits per sq. inches – 30TB to 60TB for 3.5-inch pushes and 10TB to 20TB for 2.5-inch pushes.