History 2001: HAMR to Increase Storage Density

“HAMR technology will allow us to make significant advances in capacities through increasing overall storage densities by a factor of 100 or more.” So says Dr. Robert White, professor of electrical and computer engineering and director of the 18-year old storage systems center at prestigious Carnegie Mellon University.

What exactly is HAMR, which could eventually take us to 1,000Gb per square inch? With the increasing areal density of HDDs, the data bits will become so small within the next 5-to-10 years that they may become thermally unstable due to superparamagnetism.

HAMR could solve this problem by heating the medium with a laser-generated beam at the precise spot where the bits are recorded. When heated, the medium becomes easier to write, and the rapid subsequent cooling stabilizes the written data.

To encourage research into the subject, the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has awarded a $21.6 million grant for a joint-venture between Seagate, the National Storage Industry Consortium (NSIC), Advanced Research Corp., Carnegie Mellon U., MEMS Optical, the University of AZ and Seagate’s subcontractor Euxine Technologies. The latter, incidentally, provides a comprehensive set of tools for the simulation and characterization of magnetic systems.

This article is an abstract of news published on issue 166 on November 2001 from the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter.