Throughout the last couple of years, six big companies have been fighting to become the leader in storage devices in the computing industry. Samsung, Hitachi, Seagate, Toshiba, Fujitsu, and Maxtor have tried to introduce various technologies but in the end have all come to the same conclusion, that hard disk storage needs an innovation. That innovation has come in three forms, two of which deal with capacity and the third dealing in power consumption. These are perpendicular recording, “pixie dust”, and hybrid drives, respectively.


Perpendicular Recording
Perpendicular recording is a new hard drive standard being worked on by Seagate. Originally hard disk drive technology only allowed us to store about 133GB per platter. Seagate’s Barracuda (7200.8 series) utilized three of them to produce a 400GB drive which is the first and only drive to make use of the highest density platters. When it comes to the linear recording method of course, the limit to how much data we can fit on a single platter was approaching rapidly, due to an effect called superparamagnetism. Put simply, this effect occurs when the heat generated by the hard drive begins to minutely warp magnetic fields, something which hard drives are extremely sensitive to. What perpendicular recording does is records, or magnetizes, bits vertically through the platter instead of horizontally which conserves surface area which in turn results in the effective doubling of the areal density of the platter. This allows for a larger margin of error with regards to magnetic fields, and negates the effects of superparamagnetism. Due to the experimental nature of this technology, its limits are unknown. We’ll just have to wait to see what capacities our storage manufactures can come up with. Perpendicular drives already exist today from Seagate; however, they’re only laptop models. The Momentus 5400.3 2.5” notebook series will be the first one to ever use perpendicular recording, though the 5400.3 line will have various size options the first one to be released is the 160GB model. It is planned for introduction this winter.


Pixie-Dust
To respond to the perpendicular recording craze, IBM/Hitachi tech has introduced “Pixie Dust” technology, which is said to increase platter densities by at least a multiple of 4. “Pixie Dust” is just a special project name given to antiferromagnetically-coupled (AFC) technology which can increase the data capacity of hard drives to up to four times the density possible with current drives. This media uses layers of the element Ruthenium to act as a sort of “magnetic insulator”, reducing the effects of superparamagnetism. The two magnetic layers act against each other on each sides of the ruthenium layer, not pushing each other away but rather having opposite force along the layers. As the head of the disk moves from bit to bit, it picks up the change in direction of the magnetic pull, so in the end the layers on either side can be made smaller but can still maintain their strength and resistance to superparamagnetism. “Pixie Dust” was first used in IBM’s Travelstar notebook drive, but when Hitachi took over IBM’s storage division they transferred it to the desktop which produced the Deskstar 7K400. At the moment the “Pixie Dust” technology should shove away all the competition until Seagate brings its perpendicular method to the forefront.

Hybrid Drives
The final innovation is not so much in terms of capacity, but in terms of a reduction in power use. Hybrid drives are, just as it sounds, a hybrid of two different recording media. The first is the traditional platter design. The second is a few gigabytes of flash memory. The trick is that the hard drive uses the flash memory for incoming and outgoing data. When the chip is about to reach its maximum capacity the hard drive wakes up and records the data and goes back into idle. Typically, hard drive platter motors are one of the largest consumers of power inside a laptop. In the hybrid, the drive rarely spins. They usually spin only about 30 to 45 seconds every half hour. According to the director of strategic marketing at Samsung, “The traditional hard drive takes up about 10 to 15 percent of the battery power of your notebook," Thus, in a notebook with a four to five hour battery, the hybrid drive could extend battery life by about 36 minutes. Samsung is also backing the idea that the drive could also accelerate boot-up times, due to the much faster flash memory used in the drive.


Final Words
All of these technologies are either already being implemented, or are in the process of being finalized for mass production, so the idea of a 1TB hard drive is no longer a far-off, distant dream. It could very well become a reality, very soon.