18TB hard drives made possible using table salt

Geek.com ^ | 14 October 2011 | Matthew Humphries

[ShadowAce]

Electron Microscopy images of 1.9 and 3.3 Terabit/inch² densities

Hard drive storage continues to increase at a steady rate, but just how long can we keep squeezing more data on to those platters? TDK has managed to ensure that the density keeps rising for a few more generations with its HAMR head innovation, but that may have already been rendered redundant through another discovery by a Dr Joel Yang at the Institute of Materials Research and Engineering (IMRE).

Existing hard drives max out at 3TB at the moment. TDK’s HAMR promises to take that to 6TB, but Dr Yang has found a way to increase the data density of a drive to 3.3 Terabit/inch², effectively meaning 18TB hard drives are possible.

What may surprise you is the key to this massive increase in data storage density. Dr Yang used table salt, or more specifically, sodium chloride.

Data stored on a hard drive is done so using nanoscopic magnetic grains. Typically, several of these grains (a cluster), each measuring around 7nm, are used to store one bit of information. Therefore, if you can pack them more densely together, you get more storage in the same space.

By adding sodium chloride to the mix, it has been possible to get a single 10nm grain storing one bit. Replacing several 7nm grains with one 10nm saves a lot of space and therefore ups the storage density considerably.

The good news is the use of sodium chloride can be added to existing lithography processes, suggesting it won’t take too long to get this up and running for commercial drives. So far a 1.9 Terabit/inch² storage solution has been shown to work, but that will increase to 3.3 Terabit/inch², and then further research and development is aiming to achieve 10 Terabit/inch² in the future.

For us as consumers, it means the hard drive still has quite a few years of storage bumps still to come, and a greater challenge for SSDs trying to catch up with the amount of storage on offer. This also bodes well for data centers who need to cater for a never-ending storage need as more cloud services go online.

Read more at the IMRE press release (PDF), via Physorg

[ShadowAce]

[ShadowAce]

[Betis70]

Cracking open my hard drive and getting out the Morton’s...

[decimon]

And the iodine is good for the thyristors.

[puppypusher]

That’s Great an 18 terabyte drive is just what I’m looking for.I just hope the read/write cycle can keep up.I don’t want to sit around searching for my files or hear the drive heads flying backing and forth as they struggle to do their job.

[roaddog727]

“By adding sodium chloride to the mix, it has been possible to get a single 10nm grain storing one bit. Replacing several 7nm grains with one 10nm saves a lot of space and therefore ups the storage density considerably.”

OK, what am I missing here. 1 bit of storage is 1 bit of storage. how does replacing several 7nm grains with one 10nm grain increase storage density when they specifically said each grain will store 1 bit of data?

I’m confused.

[Ingtar]

several of these grains (a cluster), each measuring around 7nm, are used to store one bit of information.

One 10nm grain replaces "several" 7nm grains.

[muawiyah]

At last we discover the real reason the Ocean is salty ~ Earth is a Data Dump!

[roaddog727]

Ok.

Got it.

[Dumpster Baby]

We've already been shown that this works.

[MarkL]

At last we discover the real reason the Ocean is salty ~ Earth is a Data Dump!

No, it's a computer, while the oceans are the storage. "42"

Mark

[Jack Hydrazine]

Fun with an old hard drive.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RU-24tIsQzc

[abb]

640 K ought to be plenty...

[Getready]

Not a microsoft fan here, but I wouldn’t be surprised if
MOST users could still use 640KB to get most of their
computer tasks done(except for the memory hungry graphic stuff(fluff)

[CarmichaelPatriot]

Not a microsoft fan here, but I wouldn’t be surprised if MOST users could still use 640KB to get most of their computer tasks done(except for the memory hungry graphic stuff(fluff)

Hardly. With the speeds CPU's are operating at, limiting memory to less than 1MB would have the processor sitting idle 90% of the time waiting for data to be moved into memory.

Granted, most software for PC's is horribly bloated, but that's due to sloppy programming techniques, which also render the resultant code susceptible to viruses and malware.

Now, 18TB HDD's? That's a whole lotta pron!

[ken21]

hcl bump.

[Larry Lucido]

When boiling spaghetti, how many gigabytes of salt should I use in the water?

[GOPJ]

Interesting. Thanks for the ping.

[zeugma]

I was wondering where I'd store all my data. What has amazed me over the years is the ability of data to expand to fill all the disk space you have. I remember thinking years ago, thinking "this 40MB drive is so huge I'll never be able to fill it up!" These days, a 40MB file isn't even considered a particularly large file. I regularly (daily) process text files that are 100-300MB to generate statistics for the the DNS servers I support at work. That's not to mention the 4+ GB ISOs and archives that I use with VMWare. Sometimes our need for storage astounds me.