Perpendicular Recording - How Perpendicular Recording Works
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Perpendicular Recording
The new technology is called perpendicular recording, and gives the secret of how it works in the name. The only differences between perpendicular and longitude recording are the platter and heads.
Perpendicular recording hard drives use platters that have been modified a little. The technology calls for an additional layer in the platter (we will find out what its purpose is later) and the sectors, the slices of the pie, are A LOT closer together. This normally would cause your data to be lost, during recording, in other sectors between it. But Seagate can do this because of the new data recording technique.
This picture probably best describes how this new technology works. It shoots the information through the recording layer into the extra layer; the data then makes its way back to the head. Instead of needing the whole magnetic field to be in a sector, it only requires a piece of it to be. As you can see it substantially cuts down on the space needed for storing each piece of data.
What does this mean for you? For starters you will at least see a lot bigger hard drives coming to the market. The new technology will allow a higher density of data in a single spot, meaning more data will fit in the same space currently offered. There should be a gain of performance, since the headers don’t have as many platters to search for data on different plates, but they also will have more space per platter to search. It should be interesting to see how this stacks up in testing.
This technology first hit he market in Toshiba 1.8” drives, commonly used in MP3 players. Retail 3.5" hard drivers hit the market in 2006 and have filtered down into much of the market segment by now.
Despite this new technology, not much else has been done to change this hard drive from its predecessors. It has the same 7200 RPM spin rate, Serial ATA 2.5 spec, including support for 300 MB/s transfer rates, Native Command Queuing, and SATA hot plugging. It will be quite clear when we see if this new technology has any performance impact on the hard drive.
Next: Testing >>
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