British Scientists Invent One Terabyte Optical Disk
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The surface of CDs and DVDs are made up of microscopic grooves filled with areas known as pits and land regions, which carry the information.
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(InfoWorld) - Researchers have demonstrated disk write speeds one hundred times faster than current hard drives. The method uses a laser to heat the recording surface and alter its magnetic field. There is no equivalent read speed increase though. According to a report in Science Now, Dutch scientists at Radboud University Nijmegen used a laser to send flashes of polarized light to a 5-micron-wide spot on a disk surface which was heated. The sheer angular momentum of the photons hitting the recording surface was then able to flip the magnetic field if the light was polarized one way, but left it unaltered if polarized in the other direction. A traditional magnetic field reader was then able to detect binary ones or zeroes accordingly. This shows the promise of heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR). The laser flash duration was 40 femtoseconds -- 40 billionths of a millionth of a second -- which is 100 times shorter than the time needed for a current write head to change the magnetic field direction on a hard drive disk recording bit. Thus there is the promise of increasing data writing speed up to one hundred times. This will enable hard disk data writing speed to better keep up with ever-faster data transfers across networks. However there are problems to be resolved. Firstly the recording area, at 5-microns wide, is very much bigger than the sub-half micron area in today's hard drives. Drive users won't accept a substantial decrease in areal density, meaning lower disk capacity, as the price of a substantial speed increase. However, the researchers expect to get it down to a 10 nanometer area. A second problem is that the read component of the disk head remains magnetic and there is, as yet, no technology promising a hundredfold increase in read speed. Physicist Julius Hohlfeld of the Seagate Research establishment in Pittsburgh says that a third problem is the need to have an affordable laser that can fire 40 femtosecond pulses. Daniel Stanciu, co-author of the research paper, expects a working prototype within ten years, which means that a commercial product could be 13 to 15 years away. That would take us to 2019 or thereabouts. Seagate has suggested that HAMR could increase area density to 50Tbit/sq inch by 2019, meaning a 40-50TB 2.5-inch hard drive would be theoretically possible.
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One-inch media storage drive marks a step forward for convergence of mobile devices.
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Why count in binary when you can use hundreds of different digits at once? That&#39;s the principle that has allowed British physicists to develop a video disk that stores far more data than has ever been possible before.
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A new class of material, which brings computer chips made from a single molecule a step closer, has been discovered by scientists.
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New Hitachi drive represents a giant leap forward in  notebook storage.
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Packaged in two units, the larger box has a motherboard while a smaller unit contains the optical drives.
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Clever 'perpendicular recording system' boosts storage capacity
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A laser capable of being focused to a spot on a rotating disk just 80 nanometers across, is what Fujitsu needed to be able to beat competitors Toshiba and Seagate, in the race toward terabit areal densities. Yesterday, Fujitsu announced they'd achieved that goal.
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Shared research produces fast, tiny memory ideal for consumer devices.
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A new type of memory could soon be available to device makers.
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Western Digital's latest external drive tops out at 1 terabyte. Plus: Handy tool kit keeps road warriors connected. In Gear Factor.
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Claims 18x burn speed The first fruit of Sony's optical drive partnership with NEC have arrived in Europe: a drive the company claims is the world's fastest DVDÂ±R writer, capable of burning single-layer discs at up to 18x speed.â¦
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Miniature hard drive will feature a Compact Flash card form factor.
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Inventors patent disc that can hold versions of films in two rival high-definition formats.
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Seagate claims to have broken the record for the most storage on a single disc platter, managing to store 133GB per disc in its newly released 400GB hard drive.
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Philips Electronics unveiled an optical disk drive on Monday for use in computers that can burn and play CDs and DVDs in three formats, including the new Blu-ray standard.