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Data Storage Technology

Toshiba 40GB Perpendicular Magnetic Record Drives 277

Posted by CowboyNeal from the hot-new-methods dept.
freitasm writes "Toshiba is now shipping a 40GB 1.8" hard disk, the first in the industry based on the PMR (Perpendicular Magnetic Recording) technology. The disk stores 40GB in a single platter, and there are plans to release a 80GB version later this year. The first models are already being used on Toshiba's new Gigabeat MP3 players." It's all part of their plan to squeeze more bits onto the head of a pin.
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Toshiba 40GB Perpendicular Magnetic Record Drives More

Toshiba 40GB Perpendicular Magnetic Record Drives

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  • Obligatory geek link - get perpendicular! (Score:5, Funny)

    by SD_92104 ( 714225 ) on Thursday August 18, 2005 @10:15PM (#13352607)
    Even though the following is from Hitachi, it is still entertaining (and maybe we can bring down their server too...)

    Get Perpendicular! [hitachigst.com]

  • Informative Video (Score:4, Funny)

    by linux_warp ( 187395 ) on Thursday August 18, 2005 @10:16PM (#13352609) Homepage
    There is a great flash video that explains perpendicular recording, with music no less, at http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/research/recording_h ead/pr/PerpendicularAnimation.html [hitachigst.com]
    produced by Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, for the curious as to how it actually works.
    • Um. Wow. I wonder how much THAT cost them...
    • "great flash video" totally undersells it.. this is easily the most entertaining thing I've seen from a technology company. If you grew up in the 80's watching Schoohouse Rock, you will totally love it. Check it out.

  • Faster... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by eviltypeguy ( 521224 ) on Thursday August 18, 2005 @10:17PM (#13352623)
    Anyone know what the performance of these "perpendicular" drives will be like compared to today's accepted methods?

    • Re:Faster... (Score:5, Informative)

      by qbwiz ( 87077 ) * <john@baumanfamily.c3.1415926om minus pi> on Thursday August 18, 2005 @10:26PM (#13352667) Homepage
      The areal density will be greater, so at the same rotational velocity the peak data transer rate should be around 1.15 ( sqrt(133/100) ) times as high as before. Seek times might also be reduced (for the same amount of data on the disk), but when both drives are full, I think the seek times would both be the same.
      • Now that I think about it some more, the actual speedup will be either .33 (if the bits used to be parallel to the direction of travel of the head), or nonexistant(if they used to be perpendicular).

    • Re:Faster... (Score:5, Funny)

      by Wireless Joe ( 604314 ) on Thursday August 18, 2005 @10:46PM (#13352769) Homepage
      Anyone know what the performance of these "perpendicular" drives will be like compared to today's accepted methods?
      When I had a perpendicular drive installed in my current mp3 player (at significant expense I might add), I immediately noticed it produced a richer, warmer tone with better bass response and aural clarity. There was some fading off in the midrange, but overall a very satisfactory listening expierence.

      Oh, wait...
  • Link is down, so here are more news articles [google.com], courtesy of Google News.

  • 40GB? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by dal20402 ( 895630 ) * <dal20402@ m a c . com> on Thursday August 18, 2005 @10:18PM (#13352631) Journal
    This isn't big news until they're using this technology on drives with more than one platter... I want my 120GB MP3 player, dammit.

    But I know we'll be hearing about it here on /. when we get perpendicular 3.5" drives. OMG 1.5TB pr0n!!1

    • Re:40GB? (Score:3, Informative)

      by Jeff DeMaagd ( 2015 )
      This isn't big news until they're using this technology on drives with more than one platter... I want my 120GB MP3 player, dammit.

      You can probably get that by buying a clunky-large brick of a player that uses the 2.5" laptop drives, such as the full sized Nomad Zen. Then you swap out the drive with the new 120GB laptop drives.
      • Smart... <consumer type=spoiled> but I want 120GB the size of a *matchbook*!!!! Waaaah!!! Incompetent engineers!!!</consumer>

        Seriously, I want my capacity, but not *that* much. The compressed version of my collection is about 85GB; until there's an iPod-or-smaller machine that big I'll just make do with my 60GB iPod.

    • It seems obvious to me they just haven't got the fabs for the new process up yet. Otherwise we would be seeing rollouts for noteboook hard rives and 2.5" server hard drives as well. The small 1.8" fab probably is a prototype fab for building the bigger ones. As for the ultra-huge hard drives, there may not even be a market for them aside from the tiny fraction of us who horde everything. When it takes a day to copy a drive at 30mb/s then the drive isn't so useful.

      • Re:40GB? (Score:4, Insightful)

        by kesuki ( 321456 ) on Friday August 19, 2005 @01:29AM (#13353358) Journal
        who says 30/MB second? that's the data rate of the 1.8 inch drive. i'm going to assume that a full 3.5 inch should be able to sustain 200-400 MB/sec depending on platter rotation. (200 MB/sec for 5400 rpm, and 400 MB/sec for 10k rpm) this is of course, only applicable for platters that have 10x the arial density, hitachi is currently only planning a drive that uses 2x the areial density, so it should only be 40-80 MB/second. of course... SATA II can only handle 300 MB/sec for all SATA 2 devices connected, and the sata Spec was only engineered around a theoretical peak of 600 MB/sec... and then you have the limitations of the FSB etc etc..

        the reason why they're going 'slow' with the perpendicular technology is because well, they've been stuck at 100GB/platter for a loong time now and they want a good 5 step 10-30 year migration to the full 1 tb/platter configuration. so they can 'keep the upgrade cycle' going. fortunately, we already have UHDV [wikipedia.org] taking a good 3.5 TB per 18 minutes so those 5 TB drives will be sure to be made obsolete whenever 400 TB (40 hours UHDV) rewriteable multi layer holographic media is designed for hard drive use (ie: near instant random data seek, multi point lasers to acheive HD comperable data thruput rates etc.)

        • Re:40GB? (Score:2, Interesting)

          by dj245 ( 732906 )
          ha. Its not the interfaces nor the drive density thats holding the speed back, its the head mechanisms. Drives today can't even fill ATA100 let alone SATA I (or II). Find me a single drive that can sustain 70mb/s and I'll eat my hat.

  • article text (Score:4, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 18, 2005 @10:21PM (#13352647)
    The MK4007GAL HDD 1.8-inch HDD packs 40GB on a single platter - the largest single-platter capacity yet achieved in the 1.8-inch form factor. This breakthrough technology sets new benchmarks for data density with the highest areal density currently on the market at 206 megabits per square millimeter (133 gigabits per square inch). The 1.8-inch PMR HDD is now shipping in Toshiba's new Gigabeat F41, enabling the MP3 player to store up to 10,000 songs.

    "Toshiba has started an exciting new frontier for the HDD industry by leading the race to achieve this revolutionary technology, which has been the industry's aim for more than 20 years," said Scott Maccabe, vice president, Toshiba Storage Device Division. "PMR opens the door to products we haven't even begun to imagine, by removing the technical barriers inherent to packing more data on an HDD. Providing greater storage capacity on mobile disk drives allows Toshiba to give system OEMs the tools they need for next-generation digital information and entertainment devices."

    Toshiba recently announced acquisition of a design center in Fremont, Calif., to help U.S.-based engineers and OEMs create new products using platforms such as PMR to span beyond the limits of today's conventional digital products. The 1.8-inch HDD form factor has been a critical component for consumer electronics products from MP3 players to handheld GPS systems and ultra-portable PCs. To date, Toshiba has shipped more than 14 million 1.8-inch HDDs since its introduction in mid-2000. The addition of PMR technology will increase capacity options for product designs beyond those currently on the market today, especially as Toshiba introduces an 80GB 1.8-inch HDD with PMR later this year.

    PMR: The Technology Achievement
    Toshiba is the first company in the storage industry to commercialize PMR, providing unsurpassed recording density and high operating reliability on its 1.8-inch HDD platform. The technology is based on a new magnetic disk structured to support perpendicular recording, a new high-performance perpendicular magnetic head, and disk and head integration technology that maximizes their combined performance.

    Conventional longitudinal recording stores data on a magnetic disk as microscopic magnet bits aligned in plane. Although advances in magnetic coatings continue to improve data recording densities on HDD, when the densities become too extreme, the magnetic bits repulse each other due to in-plane alignment. Squeezing more bits on to a disk will eventually reach a point in which crowding degrades recorded bit quality. As such, HDD manufacturers face fast-approaching limits on storage capacities.

    By standing the magnetic bits on end, perpendicular recording reinforces magnetic coupling between neighboring bits, achieving higher and more stable recording densities and improved storage capacity.

  • That's awesome. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by millennial ( 830897 ) on Thursday August 18, 2005 @10:26PM (#13352669) Journal
    I've been waiting patiently for this. However, I'd like to see them in standard sizes for IDE or SATA, not just for MP3 players... and what's with the whole "40GB is 10,000 songs" thing? What, are all songs recorded so that they'll be compressed to exactly 4MB now?
    /joke?

    • Re:That's awesome. (Score:3, Interesting)

      by ciroknight ( 601098 )
      There's this thing, called an "average" or a "mean", depending where you went to middle school. What we do is add up a bunch of things, then divide by the number we added.

      In this case, we add up the size of a bunch of songs, then divide by precisely the number of songs there are, and we get a number. That number is roughly around 4MB for a typical set of MP3s. So typical, in fact, I wrote a small C/perl program to computer the averages on all of my hard disks, and none of them were off in either directio
    • Well, if you don't like songs for a size unit, how about a Library of Congress, or a DVD rip?

      Heh, what would be fun to see in a press release is the capacity expressed in porn. "This hard drive will store 500,000 images or 1,000 porn movies."
    • Screw the MP3 Players, I need one for my Canon 3050D DSLR!

  • Raid 5 for my laptop when? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by tacarat ( 696339 ) on Thursday August 18, 2005 @10:29PM (#13352683) Journal
    I'm thinking that laptop raid would be an excellent use for these. Maybe after some power and space tweaking, a single Raid 5 cartridge could be made in place of the normal hard drive. Since high performance laptops buyers don't seem to mind a little extra bulk/weight, a laptop made to accomodate such a setup might be well accepted by hardware lovers.
    • How about we bring higher density raid systems to the desktop first ;-)
    • Yeah, that'll work unless you want to actually use the laptop that doesn't require being plugged into the wall.

    • Re:Raid 5 for my laptop when? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by adolf ( 21054 ) * <flodadolf@gmail.com> on Thursday August 18, 2005 @11:17PM (#13352889) Journal
      Raid 5? In a single unit? Forget the fact that it's in a laptop - the mere notion of a RAID array in a single device is, itself, absurd.

      You get all of the disadvantages of extra mechanical complication, along with none of the advantages (speed[1], or otherwise) of RAID.

      Count me out.

      [1]: See, it sounds like a good theory. But you'll get more speed by just using a single, larger-diameter disc than you will by using several smaller-diameter discs. If RPM is constant, and diameter increases, then so does linear velocity, and thus data rates. Etc, so on, so forth. Unless you're going to be using lots of independant discs, it's not advantageous. Oh, and it's a laptop, which is presumably meant to run on batteries at least some of the time. It's almost always more efficient to run one motor, than it is to run several of them, along with several sets of controller electronics, and several sets of head actuators, and...

  • Recording method not important (Score:4, Insightful)

    by davidwr ( 791652 ) on Thursday August 18, 2005 @10:31PM (#13352698) Homepage Journal
    99% of people don't care about the recording method. All they care about are things like price, size, performance, and other characteristics like noise, heat, etc.

    Give me small, dense, long-lasting, zillions of read/write cycles, low heat/energy, fast, compatible with existing equipment or cheap adapter card, etc. etc. and I won't care if it's flat, perpendicular, or shaped like a three-dimensional pretzel, er, I mean a protien.

  • perpendicular magnetic recording- Wikipedia (Score:3, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 18, 2005 @10:35PM (#13352712)
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpendicular_recordi ng [wikipedia.org]
  • What I want to know is can these drives walk around and sing and dance to a tune very much like the "I'm a bill" - and then, does this drive become a law when it is done?

  • Perpendicular Magnetic Recording Bible (Score:5, Informative)

    by adamdewolf ( 879951 ) on Thursday August 18, 2005 @11:24PM (#13352908) Homepage
    If you really want to know more about this tech,
    I found this book earlier in the year.
    It's pretty much the Bible for perpendicular magnetic.

    Gets really in-depth.

    Perpendicular Magnetic Recording [amazon.com]
    by Sakhrat Khizroev, Dmitri Litvinov
    "This book is intended for graduate students, young engineers and even senior and more experienced researchers in this field who need to acquire adequate knowledge of the physics of perpendicular magnetic recording in order to further develop the field of perpendicular recording."

  • HDs with two sets of heads? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Michael Woodhams ( 112247 ) on Thursday August 18, 2005 @11:29PM (#13352927) Journal
    A thought I've had in the past, which I was reminded of looking at the low RPM of this drive:

    Why not make drives with two sets of heads, 180 degrees apart on the platters? This could double access rates, and seems like it should be fairly cheap. Even if it weren't cheap, some people are prepared pay over twice as much for a 10K rpm rather than 7.2K rpm drive today.

    This seems way too obvious not to have been thought of - so what is the flaw in my reasoning?
    • It's been done in the past, and it isn't cost-effective. You need two positioners, two head assemblies, two read channel amps, two servo channels, and a faster and more complex controller. There are cheaper ways to improve speed.
      • Many years ago, I worked on a drive that used four heads in parallel, on a multi platter drive. There was only a single servo, and all the heads were already there. It was just a matter of multiplexing the data and streaming it out the I/O channel.

        I don't think I've seen anything like it since then, at least not in the consumer market. I'm not sure why it wouldn't be possible to multiplex the data from every head into the drive cache simultaneously. I'm sure it would require more electronics, but what

        • Modern recording densities require an independent positioner and servo channel for every active head.
          • Modern recording densities require an independent positioner and servo channel for every active head.

            So there's a separate positioner for every head in a multi-platter ATA drive? Or does it just switch to a different head for servo information every time it switches to a different platter?

            • There is just one positioner for all of the heads. Only one head is active at any given time. The servo information is embedded in the data surface, so a single head can be used to read both data and servo information. Every time you switch heads, the drive has to reacquire servo lock on the new surface.
          • I found the answer here:

            http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/op/act_Servo.htm [pcguide.com]

            The dedicated servo track that would make it possible to read multiple tracks at a time is obsolete, as this method is sensitive to temperature variations between the platters.

            The embedded servo track is used by all modern drives, which intersperses the servo information with the data.

            For clarification, I should note that I worked on the OS driver for a 4-head parallel drive, rather than the actual disk -- which explains my igno

      • If there are cheaper ways, why is there a market for 10K rpm drives? The cheapest local price I can find for a 74Gb Raptor (10K) is NZ$316, compared to $82-$110 for standard size 80Gb 7.2K drives, i.e. a 3-4 times price premium. If it cost twice as much to manufacture (everything duplicated except platters and spindle motor) I could still get 14.4K rpm performance for 2/3 the price of a Raptor.
        • Seagate used to make them (Sabre 5 2HP, Barracuda 2 2HP). They were high-end drives and very expensive. The technology wasn't cost-effective.

          Anybody who is really serious about performance is going to start with 15K rpm SCSI drives, not low-end IDE junk.

        • 10/15kRPM drives aren't just consumer level drives with faster motors; they use physically smaller platters and lower areal densities and higher quality components to reduce seek times and increase reliability. If you take a cheapo 80G platter consumer drive and throw another head assembly on it, you're going to make it even less reliable because of the higher component count, and probably still get beaten in real world performance because while your seek times are on the order of 10-20ms, a good 15kRPM dr
      • My guess: most of the time only one thing is being read from the disk at a time (yes several files can be open and reading, but I would suspect that only one being read right at a moment is very common). Therefore it seems the best use of two heads is to have them read 1/2 of the same track. This means that the duplicate positioning machinery is being used to place the heads at exactly the same track. If instead you added another platter or platter side, you could reuse the positioning machinery and get the
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • Basically, it's cheaper to stripe your data over multiple drives or have massive RAM caches than to build special-purpose drives.


        All that in a 1.8" single drive form factor?

        If you are using a 1.8" drive, you already have stated that you care about space. Unless Micro-ATX motherboards and cases use those small drives, raid and a multi-head 1.8" drive seem to be going in opposite directions to get faster.
    • This has been done in the past, perhaps the IBM 3380 (early 1980s) was the first, perhaps not.

      The question you have to ask is: how will the two acctuators work together? Option #1 is to have head-1 cover the outer tracks and head-2 cover the inner tracks. This leads to improved seek times (average seek time is halved, but track-to-track seek is unchanged), but does not improve rotational delay.

      Option #2 would be to have each head cover all the tracks, cutting the rotational delay is half, but leaving aver

  • 5mm high (Score:4, Informative)

    by TummyX ( 84871 ) on Thursday August 18, 2005 @11:39PM (#13352972)
    What's important is that these drives are single platter 1.8" drives. 40GB and 60GB 1.8" drives have been around for a while but they're double platter and are about 9mm high.

    These drives would be great upgrades to tablets like the NEC Litepad.

  • Big Blue Shift (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Doc Ruby ( 173196 ) on Friday August 19, 2005 @01:11AM (#13353316) Homepage Journal
    How come Toshiba and Hitachi can make profits on the HD biz, but IBM couldn't?
  • Wow, are Hitachi actually using that Engrish slogan outside of Japan? I'd assumed their overseas divisions would be too embarrassed to touch it.

    For those who haven't had the pleasure to spend time in this wonderful but infuriating country, saying "the next" without specifying the next what is a common mistake in Japanese English (presumably because the Japanese equivalent, tsugi, is a noun, not an adjective).

    Hopefully this will be the start of a fabulous new trend of Japanese companies exporting their Engri
  • Am I missing something here, or does storing bits perpendicularly also mean that one can no longer store different data on opposite sides of the same platter?

    "Factor of 10" capacity improvement, Hitachi claims? Seems to me that it should only be a factor of 5, since you are losing one side of each platter in the bargain, afaics.

  • 2.88 Floppy Diskettes (Score:5, Interesting)

    by atcurtis ( 191512 ) on Friday August 19, 2005 @04:37AM (#13353792) Homepage Journal

    Correct me if I am wrong....

    but didn't the short-lived 2.88Mb 3.5" floppies use perpendicular recording?

    (For those too young to remember, in the 1990s, IBM shipped many of their PS/2 machines with 2.88 floppy drives - unfortunately the media was too expensive, more expensive than 2 standard "High Density" 1.44 diskettes - the drives were very expensive, the heads had to support the perpendicular recording mode as well as standard - also IIRC standard controllers and BIOS couldn't support the higher capacity drives. IBM even tried to boost awareness of the newer format by imprinting a tiny "2.88" on to the blue eject buttons)

    • Yep.. and guess who created the 2.88 floppy?

      None other than Toshiba [intel.com].

      I'm not sure about the BIOS, but you're correct regarding the controller. PCGuide [pcguide.com] says the 500Kbit limitation of existing floppy controllers was insufficient; the 2.88 floppies required a 1Mbit transfer rate. I'm not sure why the drives couldn't be slowed down for the sake of compatibility though. Seems easy enough to throw a jumper on there to toggle 500Kbit/1Mbit transfer rates, but I'm no EE.

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