Currie Munce (the name as published has been corrected here and in subsequent references in this text)
Vice president of research,
Hitachi Global Storage Technologies
San Jose, Calif.
The year is 1956 and the first-ever hard disk drive lands on the market with a resounding thud. Invented by IBM, the drive is called a RAMAC, weighs about 2,000 pounds, and must be transported on a flat-bed truck.
Its capacity: 5 megabytes, large enough to store a single MP3 file.
In 1980, the hard drive is operated with a washing machine motor. It requires so much power and generates so much heat that a refrigerator-size rack filled with generators, cooling fans and tangles of cables is required to keep it working.
Total weight, including rack, motor and peripheral equipment: about 200 pounds. Total capacity: 1 gigabyte, or less than you can store on two CD-ROMs.
That trip down storage memory lane is from Currie Munce, 48, vice president of research at San Jose, Calif.-based Hitachi Global Storage Technologies.
As a 20-year veteran of the hard-drive industry, he’s also well-versed in the technology’s future: He expects by 2007, hard drives will be the size of two quarters stacked on top of each other and will hold 40 gigabytes of data, or 8,000 times the capacity of the 1-ton monster of 1956.
Today’s hard drives–or microdrives–are used in Apple’s popular iPod Mini music players and max out at 6 gigabytes. How will the capacity balloon sevenfold in two years?
The bits, says Munce, are going perpendicular.
Even today, the magnetic bits that store your data have been positioned longitudinally, end-to-end, around the disk. The bits have been lying down.
“So over the past 49 years, we’ve advanced hard-disk technology by making the size of those magnetic bits on the disk smaller and smaller, so we can increase the capacity on the same size of disk,” Munce said.
But now, the incredible shrinking bit has essentially reached its limit.
“If we make the bits any smaller, we’d make the memory volatile,” explained Munce, who has a doctorate in mechanical engineering. “Your data would become corrupt.”
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Which means?
“We’re reaching the point where your information would spontaneously erase itself.”
So the solution being implemented at Hitachi and, Munce believes, its competitors, involves making the bits stand up.
“When I stack the [bits] pointing up, I can put them closer together than when they’re lying down, pointed against each other.” And this, of course, creates room for more data-storing bits.
“We believe that this will expand the disk density by a factor of 5 to 10,” Munce said.
What will this mean to you?
For one thing, the storage capacity on MP3 players will expand dramatically.
“I think we’ll see MP3 jukeboxes at up to 100 gigabytes, and mini, microdrive players would go up to 40 gb.”
And your cell phones will come with hard drives too.
Munce believes the average wireless phone hard drive will range between 10 gb and 20 gb at first, and eventually reach more than 40 gb.
Portable media players–the ones with bright color screens designed for playing video, photos and music–will be able to store hundreds of hours of video on drives approaching 100 gb.
An animated cartoon of Hitachi’s perpendicular hard drive technology is available at www.hitachigst.com, via the “Perpendicular Recording” link.
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Hardware design is complex, precise
Making a hard drive is a multidisciplinary endeavor, said Currie Munce. Contributions are required from experts in the following fields:
– Mechanical engineering. “You have a disk that’s spinning 100 miles per hour,” Munce said. “And you have to position the head over that track in that 100 m.p.h. wind with an alignment accuracy greater than what’s used in the Hubble space telescope.”
– Chemistry. “We need to lubricate the interface to allow it to survive and implement various filtration devices so the drives don’t fail.”
– Physics. “There’s the overall magnetic design and the physics of how the head and disk operate together.”
– Computer science. “There’s code running on a full microprocessor and memory being stored using sophisticated processing.”
This complex piece of hardware is now available for less than $50.
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