CEATEC Conference Showcases Gadgets in Japan - And What About Hard Drives?
(Page 4 of 4 )
Blu-ray versus HD-DVD isn’t the only storage battle that heated up at the conference. If you’re familiar with hard drive technology, you may have heard that perpendicular technology, which started appearing last year, has given the industry new life as far as enabling the increase of drive density. But it is expected that this boost will run in course in about four to five years. That means that the first hard drives based on a new technology need to be on the market by 2011. It’s a tight timetable, but there are already two competing technologies being investigated, and some disagreement as to which one should be attempted first.
Toshiba CEO Atsutoshi Nishida revealed in his keynote that his company is working on hard drives based around patterned media. This media has certain advantages over its competition. For example, current hard drives use bits made up of cobalt-platinum grains, and patterned media technology would keep these same bits. It would reduce the number of grains in each bit, however, and isolate the bits from each other to reduce the risk of data corruption. The problem with patterned media is that it calls for using e-beam lithography and imprint lithography, something which hasn’t been done on the scale of mass manufacturing before.
Hitachi has also been advocating patterned media drives. It’s worth pointing out that the Japanese government is sponsoring some of the research into patterned media. This might help to explain Hitachi’s and Toshiba’s enthusiasm for the media.
Seagate advocates going the heat-assisted magnetic recording route first. This method proposes replacing the cobalt-platinum grains with iron-platinum grains as being less prone to data corruption. It would require a laser integrated into the hard drive to record or erase data. It would not require the lithography stretch of patterned media drives, however.
It will be years before we see any drives based on this technology. Meanwhile, we can look at the variety of items appearing at CEATEC, and hope that they’ll reach our shores sooner rather than later.
| DISCLAIMER: The content provided in this article is not warranted or guaranteed by Developer Shed, Inc. The content provided is intended for entertainment and/or educational purposes in order to introduce to the reader key ideas, concepts, and/or product reviews. As such it is incumbent upon the reader to employ real-world tactics for security and implementation of best practices. We are not liable for any negative consequences that may result from implementing any information covered in our articles or tutorials. If this is a hardware review, it is not recommended to open and/or modify your hardware. |
