Hitachi is working on 610 Gigabit per square inches hard disk drives
There’s so much talking about the solid state disks, and how they inevitably are the future of digital data recording. But while the memory chips corporations like Samsung push in this direction, the companies specialized all along in the magnetic drives business don’t give hints of wanting to retreat of a single millimeter, inflaming with the announce of new technological breakthroughs what is prefigured as a tightened battle between microchip and plate for the conquest of users’ desktops.
Hitachi Global Storage Technologies is exactly one of the companies which continue to invest huge resources in the development of magnetic technology. The Japanese multinational subsidiary, born from the acquisition of the IBM HDD division by Hitachi, has been the first to open the age of 1 nominal Terabyte hard disks in 2007, thanks to the implementation of the technology known as Perpendicular Magnetic Recording which multiplies the density of information loadable in a magnetic plate by recording the bits in a perpendicular position relative to the head, on the contrary of what was contemplated by the previous HDD generation.
Lately Hitachi has promised to exceed the yet remarkable goal of 1 Terabyte by a factor of four on the medium period, achieving in the next 3-4 years the production of 4 Terabytes hard disks. The announce coming now from Japan is perfectly in line with these promises: the corporation states to have been able to pack 610 Gigabits of data in an inch square, increasing by 2.5 times the 250 Gigabits per inch square density that marks the currently sold devices standard.
“There are some problems remaining, but we consider it possible to commercialize the technology in the not-so-distant future” stated an Hitachi spokesman regarding the suitability of the new solutions to concrete products. The company needs an average of two to three years to switch from the experimental phase to the productive one, so even if there was provided no exact timeline it’s foreseeable that the same will occur with the 610 Gigabits per inch square.
The recording density goal has been reached thanks to three different technological breakthroughs related to the magnetic head, the medium physically used to build the plates and the adoption of a new standard for the automatic error correction during the reading and writing operations on bits. The new head developed by Hitachi is capable of working with smaller magnetic tracks, being meanwhile able to safeguard the functionality of the bits recorded in the adjacent tracks better than in the past. Smaller tracks coincide obviously with the possibility to stock an higher amount of them to get space to devote to data record.
Furthermore, the material of which is made the plate from Hitachi is designed to improve the thermal stability and the recordability of the magnetic layer, features that tend to degrade with the increasing of the recording density. Lastly, the automatic error correction system that will be adopted on the new hard disk drives is the low-density parity-check code (LDPC), which opposite to the Reed-Solomon standard used now - and widely implemented on the optical disks like DVD and Blu-ray too - need a lower amount of data to work properly, earning (according to Hitachi) a further 4% of space available for users’ files.
By simultaneously adopting these three new solutions, the Nipponian company states to be able to easily reach the 635 Gigabits per inch square density target. So the evolution goes forward in the magnetic hard disk drives field too, a technology likely to continue to be competitive during the next years. Notwithstanding who, like Samsung, would like to take the market with the chips of the very expensive and yet immature SSD drives.
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