Heat-assisted storage could give you 10x more space on your computer's drive
Never stop downloading.
If you're always running out of room for
photos, videos, and music on your laptop, then science might have the answer.
Using a laser to write data to magnetic storage, researchers have been able to
increase the potential data storage capacity of hard drives by as much as 10
times - a process konwn as heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR).
Our computers write, read, and store
information by controlling and detecting whether tiny regions of the disk are
magnetised or not. This magnetic state corresponds to either a "1" or
a "0" in the binary code - known as a bit - and our files are stored
across thousands (or millions) of these bits at once. So if we want more space,
we need to find a way to shrink those magnetic regions - which are made up of
magnetic grains. And that's where this new development comes in.
As Gizmodo reports, the new technique relies
on shrinking the size of the magnetic grains used to store data, while
minimising the interference with surrounding grains, and the researchers have
now done that more effectively than ever before by using a precise laser
alongside a magnetic field.
But what does that mean? To unpack that, you
need to understand a little bit about the limitations of today's magnetic
storage, where there's a need to balance readability, writability, and
stability.
Manufacturers have previously hit a limit in
terms of making magnetic grains smaller and smaller, because the surrounding
grains caused their magnetic field to drift and thus destroy the files saved on
disk.
There's magnetic material that's more
resistant to this drift, but it's also harder to write, and requires a bigger
magnetic field to store data, which in turn causes more interference. That's
where this new laser technique can help - it allows more precision (the
resulting grains are just a few nanometres long) with a lower magnetic field by
heating the grains first.
It's an approach that's actually been around
for a while, but scientists are still working out the limitations of it. Enter
a team of researchers from TU Wien in Austria, who've been able to use the
technique to squeeze 13.23 terabits into a single square-inch of computer
drive. That type of storage compares favourably to both Blu-ray (12.5 gigabits
per square-inch) and the best hard drives on the market (1.34 terabits per
square-inch).
"We have developed a realistic simulation
model of the whole complex HAMR process, which allows to accurately calculate the
write dynamics of a device in a reasonable amount of simulation time,"
study co-author Christoph Vogler told Phys.org. "Consequently, we could
systematically optimise the major parameters of the write process in order to
show that a HAMR device with 10 Tb/in² and more is feasible and how such
densities can be reached."
Unfortunately, writing data in a laboratory
simulation is not the same as packing it into a laptop that can sit on your
desk, and the team says it will be a few years before the technology becomes
viable enough to use in consumer electronics. So in the meantime, you might
have to buy an external hard drive for all those photos.
The research has now been published in Applied Physics
Letters.