WD demos HAMR technology at the 2013 China International Forum

Nov 14, 2013 08:03 GMT  ·  By

Until now, heat assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology was something that only Seagate offered, the same way Western Digital had helium-filled HDDs. WD is getting into HAMR now too though.

Apparently, Seagate does not own an exclusive patent for heat-based data storage on magnetic platter-based drives.

At the 2013 China (Ningbo) International Forum on Advanced Materials and Commercialization, WD demonstrated a 2.5-inch HAMR HDD. It was part of the "Magnetic Hard Disk Media: Enabling High Density Data Storage" presentation.

In all honesty, we can understand why Western Digital would get on board with this. After all, HAMR has the potential to enable HDDs with 300 terabit (37.5 terabyte) capacities.

At least that's what Seagate predicted back in 2007. In fact, Seagate managed to release a drive with 1 terabit per square inch using HAMR technology.

Western Digital wants to do the same, and more, believing that the data density can be increased by a factor of more than 5 compared to normal HDDs. In the not too distant future, there should even be 4 Tb per square inch.

There are challenges though, namely increasing complexity of magnetic, thermal and optical requirements. Laser light path integration and head-disk interface reliability will need to be improved too.

"Analysts predict 25 trillion gigabytes of new data will be generated by 2020 and that average household storage needs in the U.S. will require as much as 3.3 TB by 2016," said Dr. Cain.

"This tremendous growth in data requires continued increases in storage capacity and performance for the cloud, big data and consumer technologies. WD is focused on hard drive innovations that will enable future storage capabilities, and HAMR technology is a key step in the migration path."

The beginning of HAMR can be traced back to 1954, when engineers of PL Corp working for RCA filed a patent, which described the basic principle of using heat in conjunction with a magnetic field to record data.

The patent was made mostly for tape-based storage, but eventually was used for magneto-optical drives in the 1980s (wrote data to a disk).

Now, HAMR is poised to overcome the limitation of HDD technology. Actually, it has been considered such since the year 2000, even if results only surfaced in 2012.