Perpendicular Recording
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In the ever changing, ever growing world of computers, it's hard to imagine any aspect that hasn't improved over the years. However, if you look closely you'll find that very little has been done to make hard drives faster. This review will examine a company called Seagate and the technology they claim will solve this dilemma.
Computers are always changing. It seems like today’s top of the line computer is tomorrow's mid-range computer. Our CPUs are getting faster, more efficient, and often have more than one core. Our memory is getting faster and bigger. Our video cards are becoming fast and also running in SLI or Crossfire. It seems like everything is getting more advanced and faster.
The one area I left out was hard drives. Why is that? Because not much has really changed with them. Sure, they have gotten a lot bigger -- we’re breaching the 1 TB milestone -- but they aren't getting any faster. Not much has been done to improve the hard drive's performance. We did go from ATA to SATA connections, but that has been about it recently.
Seagate has come out with some new technology that could change this. Today we will take a look at this new technology, implement it into our test computer and see what kind of results we can get. I’m hoping that this new technology brings about a faster hard drive.
First I think we need to go over how a traditional hard drive works. A hard drive is made out of mainly a head, which is the part that writes and reads the data, and the platter, the place where all the data is stored. The whole hard drive may have multiple platters to store data, and of course the same number of headers to read and write to these platters.
The platters are spun around by a motor inside the hard drive and the whole thing is controlled by an IC board that tells the hard drive what to do, what to write, and what to read. Externally, connecting the hard drive to the computer is either a PATA or SATA connector and a power port. All in all, a hard drive is a fairly simple device, but also requires the utmost precision.
For those of you that remember what a record is, a hard drive works in a very similar way. The platter is spun around and written and read in sectors -- pie-shaped wedges on a track.
So exactly how are my emails being put onto these platters? This is fairly tricky. It needs to be permanent enough to stay on there after the power is off, unlike memory, but also erasable in order to be rewritten. This is done with the magic of magnets.
The hard drive you have in your computer now is probably longitude recording technology. When an item of data is sent to the hard drive to be written, a small sector is magnetized either left or right. Seems fairly simple right? Well with all these moving parts and spinning, this creates heat. Create too much heat and the magnetic "data" will lose its magnetization -- which will cause the data itself to disappear.
This phenomenon is known as superparamagnetism. Why not up the power and make it less easy to lose the data? Well you still need to make it weak enough that the head can come in and write over it later on, when you decide you no longer need this information.
Next: How Perpendicular Recording Works >>
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