If you are curious just how Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording is able to increase the storage densities of your HDDs then this post at Nanotechweb and the linked article will make a great read. They deal with how plasmonic near-field transducers, which will oscillate in time with the frequency of a light source, as long as the light source's frequency is equal to or less than the plasma frequency. This causes heat but nowhere near as much as if the light was used directly and so avoids potentially damaging hotspots. They also delve into the materials which are being tested to provide more efficient heat transmission; it is not light reading but it is very informative for those curious about HAMR's development and future.
"Heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) is a leading technology for advancing hard-disk-drive areal density beyond 1 Tb/in2. To reduce the magnetic coercivity, near-field transducers (NFTs) made of plasmonic nanostructures are used."
Here is some more Tech News from around the web:
- Hack Air-Gapped Computers Using Heat @ Slashdot
- The Week in Security: BIOS bugs, Amazon flaws, and PoSeidon malware @ The Inquirer
- Got a killer Microsoft or Oracle cloud deal? Start sweating @ The Register
- How to Set Up Your Linux Dev Station to Work From Anywhere @ Linux.com
- Pixar Releases Free Version of RenderMan @ Slashdot
- First Prototype of a Working Tricorder Unveiled At SXSW @ Slashdot
- ARM plans to win 20 per cent of the server market by the year 2020 @ The Register
Now if this increase in areal
Now if this increase in areal density and the R/W capability can translate into improved speed and reliability that can cost compete against SSDs, you might have something.
Personally, it looks like SSDs will catch up to HDDs (if not eclipse) HDDs in capacity and cost in this time frame. There is also the issue of mechanical and moving components.
Still, it’s interesting tech and I wouldn’t sell my silver stock right now regardless ….
Performance is proportional
Performance is proportional to density. Since it’s linear speed (rotation) that matters you probably need slightly more than 4X density increase to double performance.
I doubt it scales exactly with density due to seek times etc so it might be closer to 50% faster with 4X density increase.
Sigh. Time to put on our
Sigh. Time to put on our Parachute-Pants: it’s HAMR-Time! Can’t touch this!
Really, whatever happened to all those other memory technologies that were supposed to replace flash memory, like memristors or phase change memory? Or even racetrack memory, where you move the bits instead of the substrate?