Is Perpendicular Magnetic Recording at the End of its Road?

Last month, Seagate unveiled the world’s first 3TB consumer hard drive – albeit an external one. The launch was rather impressive, though, because months earlier, it sounded like it was going to be quite a while before a 2TB+ drive would become a reality. But thanks to Seagate’s clever thinking (or tricks as some would call them), the drive was a possibility, and is currently being sold for about $200.

A mere five years ago, though, densities as high as this wouldn’t have been made possible if not for the introduction of PMR, or Perpendicular Magnetic Recording, an interesting technique of aligning the poles of the magnetic bits in a perpendicular manner, essentially making for room for additional storage space.

That was five years ago, and though five years really isn’t that long of a time period, it’s looking as though that PMR is near the end of its road. As ConceivablyTech mentions, Samsung has just released a three-plattered 2TB hard drive that features 667GB per platter. In the earlier days of PMR, the theoretical limit was thought to be 800GB~1TB per square inch, and with this Samsung weighing in at 739GB per square inch… we’re “inching” a closer to that.

The solution looks to be something called heat-assisted magnetic recording, which first heats up the material in order to write the data, and in using different magnetic compounds, more bits can be fit in a given area. It might still be a while before we see “HAMR” become a reality, but given the increasing storage demands, you can bet the storage companies are working hard on getting it out the door as soon as possible.

At 667 GB per disk, the new drive ends up at 739 Gb per square inch storage density. To put that into perspective, the first drive that made the transition from linear magnetic to perpendicular magnetic recording was announced in January 2006: Seagate’s 160 GB 2.5” drive featured 132 GB per square inch or 80 GB on each of its two 2.5” disks. Back then, it was believed that perpendicular recording would scale somewhere into the area of 500 Gb to 1 Tb per square inch density.