Magnetic storage turned on its head

Seagate Technology has fired the latest salvo in the battle for greater areal density in magnetic storage media, by rethinking a major part of the way data is recorded.

In internal prototyping, the company has achieved the mark of 100 gigabits per square inch, which is around twice as dense as commercially available magnetic storage systems. The improvement on traditional methods came primarily from Seagate's implementation of perpendicular recording, a technique in which the magnetic bits are arranged vertically on end, instead of the normal method of being placed horizontally.

The official benchmark was set at 100Gb per square inch at a recording rate of over 300 Mbps. This beat the previous record for perpendicular recording systems of 60Gbpsi. The saving on surface area of the media was the main reason for the areal density improvement, according to the company.

Seagate said it anticipated "implementing perpendicular recording within its products perhaps as early as calendar year 2004".

While the potential for perpendicular recording could be as high as one terabit per second, it is not the only method expected to reach this density level, with IBM announcing in June that it had also cracked the same mark (see story). However, IBM had to invent a whole new process to achieve that goal, whereas Seagate's methodology is merely a modification of an existing technology - and thus would be cheaper and quicker to implement.

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