History 2001: Seagate at 100Gb per Square Inch on HDD

Seagate Technology has demonstrated a 100GB per square inch areal density on a hard disk drive, which amount to 3.5-inch platters of 125GB each, compared to a current maximum 40GB.

The company, however, offered no specifics about a release date for such HDDs.

“We have used fully integrated components that are close in design to volume producible devices,” said CTO Tom Porter.

Recording components consist of a focused ion beam-trimmed fully integrated magnetic read/write head flying at a nominal head/media separation of 0.55 microinch over a multilayer antiferromagnetioc coupled (AFC) disk. The width was 4.9 microinches for the writer and 3.75 microinches for the reader. The data channel and pre-amplifier are standard off-the-shelf components. Rotational speed was 4,000rpm.

The 101.1Gb per square-inch density breaks down to 149,000 tracks per inch and 680,000 bits per inch. Data rate was 256Mb/s.

This article is an abstract of news published on issue 167 on December 2001 from the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter.