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The future of magnetic data storage technology

 Award plaque by D. A. Thompson
and J. S. Best

In this paper, we review the evolutionary path of magnetic data storage and examine the physical phenomena that will prevent us from continuing the use of those scaling processes which have served us in the past. It is concluded that the first problem will arise from the storage medium, whose grain size cannot be scaled much below a diameter of ten nanometers without thermal self-erasure. Other problems will involve head-to-disk spacings that approach atomic dimensions, and switching-speed limitations in the head and medium. It is likely that the rate of progress in areal density will decrease substantially as we develop drives with ten to a hundred times current areal densities. Beyond that, the future of magnetic storage technology is unclear. However, there are no alternative technologies which show promise for replacing hard disk storage in the next ten years.

Originally published:

IBM Journal of Research and Development, Volume 44, Issue 3, pp. 311-321 (2000).

Significance:

The magnetic hard disk drive has evolved through the past four or five decades by incorporating successive innovations that have increased storage capacity, performance, and availability, while concurrently allowing a miniaturization that has reduced power requirements, particularly in large arrays of drives. In 1956, the IBM System 305 (RAMAC®) was the first computer to use magnetic hard disks for data storage. Fifty 24-inch-diameter platters, each coated with iron oxide paint and mounted on a rotating spindle, magnetically stored up to 5 MB of data. By the year 2000, the areal density (Mb/sq. in.) for data storage on magnetic hard disks had increased more than a million times and the costs per MB of data decreased about a million times. The significant improvement in size, performance, and cost of the magnetic hard disk drives are the result of many technological innovations and evolutionary changes. This highly cited overview describes the paths taken to accomplish these changes.

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