Western Digital: HDD capacity doubled with nanotech breakthrough

[nsane.forums]

The nanotech discovery may lead to denser and denser HDDs

Western Digital has announced what it said is a nanotechnology breakthrough that will allow the company to double data storage capacity on hard disk drives (HDD).

The discovery was made by HGST Labs, a company owned by Western Digital (WD), using a technique called nanolithography which is used to imprint patterns on the thin film of hard drive platters where data is to be stored. The process overcomes the challenges associated with photolithography, a semiconductor technology used for making successively smaller circuit features in shorter wavelengths of light, among other things.

The discovery allows for twice the bit density of today's disk drives. Nanolithography was used to make dense patterns of "magnetic islands" that appear as small dots in about 100,000 circular tracks required for disk drives.

To make the magnetic islands, HGST Labs used the nanotechnologies to created dense patterns of even smaller 10-nanometer structures, each only about 50 atoms wide.

"We made our ultra-small features without using any conventional photolithography," Tom Albrecht, an HGST fellow, said in a statement. "With the proper chemistry and surface preparations, we believe this work is extendible to ever-smaller dimensions."

HGST said it is the first company to combine self-assembling molecules, line doubling and nanoimprinting to make rectangular features as small as 10 nanometers in the radial and circular paths necessary for rotating disk storage.

The company expects bit-patterned media similar to its discovery to become a cost-effective means of increasing data densities in magnetic hard disk drives before the end of the decade.

"The emerging techniques of self-assembling molecules and nanoimprinting utilized at the HGST Labs will have an enormous impact on nanoscale manufacturing, enabling bit-patterned media to become a cost-effective means of increasing data densities in magnetic hard disk drives before the end of the decade," Currie Munce, vice president of HGST Research, said in a statement.

View: Original Article

[xpmule]

i'd settle for reliability than bigger drives.. i had to RMA a WD Green drive a little while back and they sent me a Black one in return..

Looking on the net you see a LOT of problems.. such as Newegg or Tigerdirect users that bought a bunch and only some work or sometimes none..

the failure rate is mind blowing.. and i mean dead out of the box too !

So yeah you look at places like that or even their own forum and you will see some harshly faulty products the make.

in fairness i think the other guys get their fair share of RMA's too.

[DKT27]

i'd settle for reliability than bigger drives.. i had to RMA a WD Green drive a little while back and they sent me a Black one in return..

Looking on the net you see a LOT of problems.. such as Newegg or Tigerdirect users that bought a bunch and only some work or sometimes none..

the failure rate is mind blowing.. and i mean dead out of the box too !

So yeah you look at places like that or even their own forum and you will see some harshly faulty products the make.

in fairness i think the other guys get their fair share of RMA's too.

Getting WD Black in replacement of Green? Damn, you are very very lucky. Why? Because Green ones are POC, they are useless, use just a little less power and they charge more for it. Not only that, they run at 6700RPM or something, instead of normal desktop ones with 7200RPM. Black on the other hand, are high performance ones. I'm not sure, but in my days, Black used to also come in 10,000RPM. Not anymore it seems.

[xpmule]

that is because i was complaining in the forum a lot and they knew it for one thing..

2nd i asked them ;)

One of the mods contacted me and said he's sending a tech support guy my way

and that guy said how can i help ?

I said RMA my drive and can you give something with better reliability and performance ?

he/she said ya sure no problem i'll send you a black drive.. so i figured SCORE ! :) cool lol

and further more i told them i don't have a credit card and i need to do an Advanced RMA

and again the guy said ya sure no problem and he said i'll give you a pre paid packing slip

that i printed out and taped to my box etc.. normally they want a deposit with a CC for an advanced RMA

so they can ship you the new drive BEFORE they get your old one and they also charge money for the shipping slips from UPS.

i think 5 business days later i had my drive and its working flawless since i got it (i'm lucky)

even though my Green drive was giving me problems since day one (i had it a year) and i had to RMA it etc

i DO feel very lucky and had a good experience with customer support.

So my comments here are vaguely on-topic 'ish ..kinda lol

Anyway cool story and thanks for sharing the news :)

[MidnightDistortions]

i'd settle for reliability than bigger drives.. i had to RMA a WD Green drive a little while back and they sent me a Black one in return..

Looking on the net you see a LOT of problems.. such as Newegg or Tigerdirect users that bought a bunch and only some work or sometimes none..

the failure rate is mind blowing.. and i mean dead out of the box too !

So yeah you look at places like that or even their own forum and you will see some harshly faulty products the make.

in fairness i think the other guys get their fair share of RMA's too.

I totally agree, they could be making reliable hard drives instead of worrying about the capacity. We're at 4TB now? How much higher do people want it? I totally get the 'i ran out of space' problem when you have tens of thousand video on it, heck my 2TB is full already but i don't want to be worried that my hard drive is going to die out on me at some point. And for awhile i had to RMA quite a bit of 1 & 2 TB hard drives because they were dead on arrival. WD is generally a reputable company too, it's crazy how many of their drives are bad. It's either the vendor handling the drives poorly or the higher densities are killing the reliability factor.

All i care about is having a hard drive that will be good for 5 years minimum. In my time of using computers i only had a handful give out before the 5 years are up. I don't know if it's pure luck or i keep my system properly protected from viruses or surge protectors are what keep the hard drives from failing but i'd like to keep it that way, better if possible. They're not that expensive now but i need money for other things and the one thing that would be nice is to use an old hard drive on a new system without fear of failure.