Magnetic recording technology continues to make rapid advancements in storing information, currently doubling in storage densities every year. The goal of our work in IBM Research is to develop the fundamental understanding and innovative breakthroughs that allows this tremendous rate of progress to continue. In the future, however, the current method of magnetically storing data may reach its limit of achievable density.
At IBM Research, we are also exploring methods using alternate materials and techniques for storing information. The manufacturing aspects of storage devices, in terms of cost, yield, and quality are also critical and an area of study for our researchers.
In addition to work in the fundamentals of data storage technologies, we also pursue numerous projects in system design, both, at the drive level, and at the storage subsystem level. Performance, ease of use, advanced functionality, management of storage, and availability are all key attributes of storage systems.
Research over the past several years includes:
- Magnetism, materials, and recording physics of heads and disks (magnetic media)
- Recording electronics, signal processing, data coding, and hard disk drive architectures
- Mechanical design and integration for disk drives
- Drive chemistry and reliability
- Exploratory recording schemes, including probe based storage (AFM), holographic storage, patterned media
- Advanced functionality for storage subsystems, such as remote copy utilities and high performance file systems
- Advanced storage adapters for NT and UNIX
- Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices
- Storage management software
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