Hard Drives Get 3D Towers to Double Density James White April 29, 2011 Standard HDDs still have a few tricks up their sleeve it seems. A research team in France has come up with a way to double the areal density of hard drives by creating “3D towers” to store data. This discovery could lead to a number of HDD improvements to maintain their place in the market for years to come. The research team’s concept to achieve a 2-bit-per-dot media involves stacking in-plane and perpendicular-to-plane magnetic media atop each dot, which will produce the shape you see above (left image). The current platter surface (image on the right side above) currently use dots as the separate storage nodes. Areal density of our believed HDDs usually involves increasing the number of nanodots, while this approach increases the data each dot can hold. If these 3D towers do come close to the predicted 100% increase in areal density, we will gain two things. The first is obviously we will get much larger storage drives for each of the standard size HDD’s (3.5″, 2.5″, and 1.8″). We should also see huge performance increases for mechanical HDDs due to the amount of data read theoretically doubling per rotation. The questions now are how hard is this to implement, and how long will it take to be added to mass production techniques? I don’t want something like this ending up like HRD’s (hard rectangular drives) where it just takes too long to get to market. Maybe this new technique in density increase could help HRDs become a reality, as I believe they can only have one platter. Source: TG Daily Share This With The World!
