日立：硬盘技术会不断发展

新闻我最牛

我认识就职于Seagate的一位校友，拥有了国内、国外2个名牌大学的博士学位，在这家硬盘公司做资深工程师。他对目前的高科技行业非常悲观，他说他们公司有无数的Ph.D，辛辛苦苦地工作，搞出来的东西现在越来越不值钱(好像目前300GB的硬盘售价只有400元RMB了？)，高科技的出路在哪里？

姑且不讨论这么大的一个问题，就眼下把，随着压缩视频技术的发展、多媒体播放器的普及，再大容量的硬盘也会很快被塞满，如果哪一天光纤到家得到普及(武汉已经率先大面积推广基于EPON的FTTX技术)，人们的视觉胃口不再满足于SD的视频节目而转向到HD, 我想大多数年轻人手中几百GB的硬盘也将跟现在64MB的存储卡一样被弃置不用了。

因此那些博士们还要努力，还要将科技推向其极限，即使高科技成了白菜、土豆，也要让这些高级的农产品个大、高产。

这不日立说我们能做得更好，不久的未来 -2011年，台式机将配置4TB而笔记本电脑将配置1TB的存储设备。

如何实现？这个我不懂，要了解点皮毛除了有非常深厚的电磁场理论基础之外，还要牵扯到很多微机械的理论，实在深奥。看一下的文章把，虽然您可能也不明白为什么，但了解到这么一个美好的技术前景总是好的。
Hitachi: Hard Drives Are Getting Better

By MAY WONG, AP Technology Writer
  (AP) -- Multimedia stockpilers need not worry aboutlaptops, digital video recorders or portable music players hitting astorage capacity ceiling any time soon.

Hitachi Ltd. says itsresearchers have successfully shrunken a key component in hard drivesto a nanoscale that will pave the way for quadrupling today's storagelimits to 4 terabytes for desktop computers and 1 terabyte on laptopsin 2011.

                A terabyte can hold the text of roughly 1 million books, 250 hours of high-definition video, or a quarter million songs.

"It means the industry is making good progress to advance thecapacity of disk drives and move to smaller form factors," said JohnRydning, an analyst at market research firm IDC.

The feat, which Hitachi plans to present Monday at thePerpendicular Magnetic Recording Conference in Tokyo, revisits atechnology known as giant magnetoresistance, or GMR, that was the basisof the work of two European scientists who won the Nobel Prize inphysics last week.

A hard drive has a metal disk inside that spins as an arm with anelectromagnetic head at its tip hovers over it. The head reads bits ofdata by registering the magnetic bearing of the particles on the disk.

Capacities of hard drives have grown as researchers have crammedmore bits of data closer together while also making the heads sensitiveenough to read the data. The industry looks to new technologies everytime physical limitations kick in, and GMR - which allows for extremelythin layers of alternating metals to detect weak changes in magnetism -was one of the breakthroughs that led to the fastest growth rate in theearly 2000s, allowing hard drives to double in capacity every year.

But GMR-based heads maxed out, and the industry replaced thetechnology in recent years with an entirely different kind of head. Yetresearchers are predicting that technology will soon run into capacityproblems, and now GMR is making a comeback as the next-generationsuccessor.

"We changed the direction of the current and adjusted the materialsto get good properties," said John Best, chief technologist forHitachi's data-storage unit.

By doing so, Hitachi said it has created the world's smallest diskdrive heads in the 30-nanometer to 50-nanometer range, or about 2,000times smaller than the width of an average human hair.

Other hard drive companies are working on similar technology aswell, Rydning said. He predicted the entire disk drive industry willbegin migrating to this new type of GMR-based technology in 2009.