Fujitsu develops nanohole hard drive

Link: Fujitsu develops nanohole hard drive
Filed under: Hardware News, Technology News

Fujitsu has announced a major step forward in the development of hard drives that can hold a terabyte of data in each square inch of recording surface. This technology could provide a smaller hard drive, with lower power consumption and cooling requirements, combined with substantially higher storage capacity.

Fujitsu’s latest development involves a 2.5in disk made of an innovative ‘patterned medium’. The company has verified the disc’s read/write capability.

The technology uses perpendicular magnetic recording techniques, rather than the currently used longitudinal recording techniques which provide 200 Gbits per square inch.

Fujitsu started work on its patterned media approach in June 2005. It involves the use of anodised aluminium to create a pattern of “nanoholes”, each of which holds magnetic material which stores a single bit of data.

In January 2007, the company announced that it had refined the approach to the stage where it was certain that it would be able to eventually produce 1TB per square inch storage-density drives.

This would require nanoholes of diameter 13nm, while Fujitsu is currently at the stage of producing nanoholes of diameter 25nm. It is estimated that products with the 1TB per square inch drive could come to market around 2010.

Fujitsu’s latest development uses 100nm holes to make a 2.5in patterned media rotating disk capable of being read and written using a “currently available” flying read/write head.

Fujitsu has also created for the first time an “ideally ordered” arrangement of nanoholes that that drives are going to need to be able to function efficiently.

The company is developing the technique in collaboration with the Kanagawa Academy of Science and Technology (Japan).