Toshiba Claims Bit-Patterned Drive Breakthrough

CWmike writes "Toshiba will detail a breakthrough in data storage later Wednesday that it says paves the way for hard drives with vastly higher capacity than today, reports Martyn WIlliams. The breakthrough has been made in the research of bit-patterned media, a magnetic storage technology that is being developed for future hard disk drives. Bit-patterned media breaks up the recording surface into numerous magnetic bits, each consisting of a few magnetic grains. Under a microscope, the magnetic bits look like thousands of tiny spheres crammed next to each another. Data is stored on these magnetic bits: One magnetic bit can hold one bit of data. Prototypes of the media have been made before but Toshiba says its engineers have, for the first time, succeeded in producing a media sample in which the magnetic bits are organized into a pattern of rows."

Re:I'm not a hardware guy

[mcgrew]

RTFA, it's enlightening, not all that technical, and not TLTR. And you really should learn how the hardware works; writing software is a LOT easier if you understand the underlying mechanics.

Re:Advancing the Past

[MBGMorden]

Because solid state's main hold back has always been capacity. Magnetic media capitalizing on it's main selling point isn't unexpected.

Besides, I see the future is being a mix. Solid state for my boot drive containing all my programs and such. Magnetic media for my Bittorrent and iTunes drive where I need space but not speed (afterall write speeds to those drives are limited by my dirt slow internet speed, and read speads only have to be quick enough to keep up with playback).

Thanks, firehose

[blair1q]

You know, I deliberately posted a different version of this summary [slashdot.org] specifically because the summary that was selected here is a lazy cut-and-paste of the poorly written lead of TFA itself.

And not only wasn't my superior summary not selected, but it's been deleted from the firehose page [slashdot.org], where it should appear between Minority Report Style Iris Scanners in Mexico [slashdot.org] and Cats Lies and the Research PR Machine [slashdot.org].

Slashdot has gone from valuable to random, and is going from random to stupid.

Re:Advancing the Past

[CastrTroy]

However the smart hard drive vendor would realize that spinning platters are headed out the door, and that they should invest in solid state technology, lest they be left in the dust. There's nothing really stopping the availability of high capacity SSDs except cost. You can already get 1.28 TB SSDs [fusionio.com] with insane speeds (1.1 GB/s read, 1.5 GB/s write), if only you're willing to pay the cash. As prices come down, there will be no reason to get a spinning platter drive. Notice how all the SSD makers are not the big HardDisk makers. They should be shaking in their boots, because a large part of their business is going to go away within 5 years. If spinning platter makers don't change something soon, their market is going to be reduced to a small fraction of what it was.

Re:oh really?

[dgatwood]

So basically, they reinvented the hard-sectored disk? *confused*

Re:Do not want

[jedidiah]

Backing up a 1TB hard drive is a trivial concern when measured against the cost of a 1TB SSD.

The gulf in price between spinny disks and SSD buys a lot of redundancy.

Re:Advancing the Past

[DeadboltX]

The smart hard drive vendor would realize that spinning platters are not going anywhere, especially in large enterprise situations where a LOT of money is to be made, and that if you increase the density of the platters (5x according to TFA) then you can also increase the performance of the drive to possibly match or exceed the sequential read speeds of current SSD.

Spinning platter HDD are not going anywhere until SSD prices become CHEAPER per byte than regular HDD. Regular HDD technology is still improving, as witnessed by this article, and there is no telling when it will slow/stop, or when SSD technology will slow/stop. It is perfectly conceivable for technology to get to a point where SSD can no longer increase in capacity without increasing physical size, while spinning platter may continue to increase capacity with the same form factor. It is also possible that spinning platters may some day greatly exceed the performance of SSD.

You sound like the kind of person who would be surprised to hear that tapes are still widely used for backing up and archiving data.