if you're going to be in the market for a hard drive in the next couple years then you're going to experience Hammer
Time and no I'm not talking about a hard drive that plays rap music and wears
parachute pants today's video is about heat assisted magnetic recording or
Hammer which will greatly increase Drive capacities you might already know that
data on a hard drive is stored by tiny magnetic grains that sit on the dis
platters a group of these grains can store one bit that's a zero or a one
depending on which way it is turned when you write something onto your hard drive
the drive's head will apply a magnetic field to turn the Grain in a certain way
that's what stored data is but as hard drives have gotten more and more
spacious over the years manufacturers have gotten into the problem where
magnetic grains can only be made so small before they become unstable and
start flipping randomly limiting the amount of data that you could fit onto
one hard drive but as it turns out heating the disc can make the bits more
stable by decre inreasing the platter's coercivity what this means in Practical
terms is that the heat makes it easier for the drive head to turn the grain
correctly so that data is recorded accurately Hammer drives do this by
using a tiny laser smaller than a grain of salt on the Reed right head but
because you can't focus a laser down to the size of a bit on the platter the
laser instead is absorbed by something called a nearfield transducer or nft a
technology that's only been around since the 1990s the nft can converts the laser
light into something called surface plasmons which are basically small
electrical currents that travel down the nft and heat a small area of the disc up
to 400 to 500° C however the disc cools
as soon as the right is complete so you won't have to worry about some sort of
catastrophic Drive meltdown so this means another thing you probably won't
have to worry about is running out of space after Hammer's introduction in
2018 or 2019 it's projected to provide
20 terabytes of storage on one drive starting at around 2020 and increased
this capacity to about 30 to 40% year
after year all the way up to 100 terabytes on a single drive when it's
combined with bit patterned media which is a technology that allows a bit to be
stored on just one single grain rather than a group of grains which will
increase data density all right Luke that sounds like quite a bit of space
for all my junk but won't that hit my wallet quite hard actually Hammer drives
aren't projected to be more expensive than current drives when you take
capacity into account as you wouldn't need as many platters to hold the amount
of data that you would want which would reduce the cost since Hammer is a
technology for spinning hard drives Hammer discs won't exactly be as fast as
ssds but you could see a 10 to 15% performance increase simply due to the
higher data density since the read WR head can access more data in one
rotation of the disc so keep an eye out for Hammer drives the next couple years
if you keep running out of space and although this episode was not sponsored
we'd like to thank our friends over at Seagate for giving us some help with the
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