Finally, they are heating the platter intentionally! I was wondering how long they were going to wait before they kicked up my case temperature a couple of degrees.

I wonder how many minutes of porn that is??

...not nearly enough.

Heh HAMR that reminds me of some new MOTO phone... one as big as a brick.

A product with a "tiny form factor" called... "Probe"? Did they leave off the word "Anal" in front of that name?

Wow is this like Deja-Vu of the new year? This is the same technology that brought you MO (Magnetic Optical) drives, and MiniDiscs....

though I'm sure Segate has further advanced it for HDD use.

Hard drive manufacturers put an insane amount of development into their drives. There were many technological hurdles to overcome for the development of HAMR in mass produced consumer electronics.

People have demonstrated HAMR as a principle in magnetic recording for a long time now (as in it is possible). Specialized setup to essentially write a very small bit while heating it with a laser, but not an entire drive.

The technology is no different from a regular hard drive, except you have to heat the bit up before you can write it. You would not need the laser to read the bits. As for extra power, I can't imagine it would be much more as the bits are extremely small, and also you should need less current to write the actual data since the bits are smaller making the heads smaller.

I could go into more detail why this is all necessary, but it boils down to if you make the bits on current disks sufficiently small, then there is enough energy at room temperture to flip the bits randomly. If you make the disk so the bits don't flip randomly, then you can't generate a magnetic field strong enough to write the bit in the first place, unless you heat the bit to make it easier to write.

I was just going to say that.

I do wish they would make mention of the transfer rates as well, not just how much they can stuff on to a platter. These days of 750gig hard drives it's hard to imagine more unless you need to watch all the episodes of Hogan's Heroes all at one time in HiDef. Sure it's more, but is it faster for load times and access times?

It's HAMR time!

For fuck's sake. This news both elates me and fills me with unholy rage.

I remember in 1993 when I had my 20mb hard drive and I thought I was the luckiest kid in the world. Of course, the feeling didn't last long because, back then, storage capacity increased exponentially every few months or so. But for the past 2 years or so, storage capacity has really come to a screeching halt, and while we're promised new technologies all the time, they're either so far in the future or simply vaporware. It's about time the terabyte replaced the gigabyte, as the gigabyte did to the megabyte back in, when was it, 98?

Hehe - "Laser"

Now all I need is a shark with friggen heat-assisted magnetic recording devices on its head!

"also see the article from yesterday on plastic chip development. It will eventually cost 90% less than silicon, and when you think that polyester is plastic... talking underwear? this reminds me of something out of neuromancer, clothes that mimic your environment to the point of becoming invisible."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/6227575.stm

heat is fine but is counterproductive in that it requires more energy to run - bad for already over-worked laptop batteries.

Add their perpendicular recording, and it will really be nice to see what capacities they are actually able to achieve.