A 3000TB hard drive?…it comes all down to chemistry

What if you could store 1000x more data than you can store today?

When you think about it, you can already store 600,000x more data than you could 30 years ago when comparing the 5MB hard drive “dinosaur” found alive vs the 3.0TB hard drives available today. At the same time the amount of digital content worldwide has grown exponentially as well. In fact, it is antiicpated that the amount of digital content created in 2020 will be 30X what it is today, from 1200 Exabytes to 30,000 Exabytes.

The problem lies in that it is becoming increasingly difficult for hard drive manufacturers like Seagate to increase what it known as aerial density – the amount of data you can store on a single platter.  The current PMR (Perpendicular Magnetic Recording) technology is quickly being stretched.  According to Wikipedia, “Perpendicular recording is predicted to allow information densities of up to around 1 Tbit/sq. inch (1000 Gbit/sq. inch).”  Considering Seagate’s announcement of a 1TB/disk desktop drive coming this summer, we are already 62.5% there with an aerial density of 625 Gigabits per square inch.

Sure there are technologies being developed like HAMR (Heat-assisted magnetic recording)  and BPM (Bit Patterned Media) that are projected to increase aerial density by 100 fold, some saying allowing for a 37.5TB 3.5-inch hard drive…someday.

But aerial density is not defined only by the platters or disks. Technologies like HAMR and BPM are more of a reflection of the heads  (the magnets that actually read & write to the platters) having the ability to reliably read and write without affecting the other media bits around them. The secret to taking advantage of a disk’s  surface area to increase aerial density lies with the heads, and HAMR and BPM only get us so far. Like PMR, they have limits to how high they can go – capacity-wise.

Enter the researchers at the University of Nottingham who are developing a “Molecule-sized magnets could promise leap for data storage capacity”, according to an article posted on DW-World.de.   According to the article, “The aim of a manufacturer of a hard disk is to try to get more and more information onto the disk so that you can store more information in a smaller space,” said Martyn Poliakoff, a chemistry professor at the University of Nottingham. Today’s hard disk magnets are already incredibly small, just a few hundred nanometers wide. Yet that is big compared to single molecule magnets. Using these could increase data storage a thousandfold.”

The catch?  Excessive heat causes the molecules to lose their magnetism, and thus your data… the next step:  “to get them into systems which could actually be used in a hard drive and to then find out whether they are actually any good from a technological standpoint.”

There is a ton of work to be done here to make this a feasible solution, but it is good to see researchers are continuing to reach beyond existing technologies and into areas like Chemistry to make disk based storage even more futuristic. So cut it some slack, after all, hard drives are not the clunky mechanical devices caught in the past, a dying technology, etc that many say they are…

I still think they’re a technological wonder that are worked harder than almost any mechanical device out there…

How ’bout you?