New Technology From Seagate Boosts Storage

( 2/10/99; 2:00 PM EST)
By Andy Patrizio, TechWeb

The constant problem of disk space could be solved, at least for a little while, thanks to new drive technology from Seagate Technology that will let the company deliver 100-gigabyte drives within two years.

Seagate recently announced a pair of new drive technologies, a GMR head and magnetic thin-film, low-noise, ultra-smooth cobalt alloy media for increased areal density. The new media in conjunction with the new drive head allows for much more data to be squeezed into the same area as before.

This year, the company will introduce drives with a 6-gigabit-per-inch capacity -- double the 3-gigabit capacity of current drives, which use anisotropic magneto resistance. This will translate to 9 gigabytes per platter, or drives starting at 36 GB of storage, according to Nigel Macleod, vice president of the advanced concepts lab at Seagate.

Drives with the 16 gigabits per inch will appear at the end of the year 2000, which will allow for 22 GB per platter. This will allow for drives with 80 to 100 GB of storage.

Increasing the areal density is useless without the new GMR head, said Macleod. The new GMR heads have an increase in sensitivity by a factor of four, so it can detect the same signal that's one-quarter as thick as previous tracks. This lets Seagate pack more tracks on the drive.

The third big change is in the head technology. The head runs over the drive at a height of 15 nanometers, about 1/100 the diameter of a fine silk thread.

This will mean a big jump in disk performance. Hard-disk speeds have hovered at 5,400 revolutions per minute and 10 milliseconds of access time for a few years now, with 7,200-RPM drives coming out in greater quantities only recently. Seagate's high-end drive, the 18-GB Cheetah LP, runs at 10,000 RPM with a 5-ms seek time and can transfer data at up to 325 MB per second.

Macleod said he predicts the Cheetah technology with GMR will be a standard desktop drive within two to three years. High-end GMR-based drives for servers will move up to 14,000 to 15,000 RPM with seek times of 4 ms, or less with a 700-MB transfer rate.

That kind of performance is important to some, but not the everyday user, said Crawford del Prete, vice president of storage research for International Data Corp., in Framingham, Mass.

"There is a segment of the market that wants very high performance, and there are areas of the market where there just isn't enough capacity," he said. "But for the average Joe, do we need that capacity? The answer is no."

The Seagate announcement also has to do with technical one-upsmanship, said del Prete. "Seagate is trying to reassert a level of leadership IBM has captured of the last few years," he said. "Seagate is making a big deal of this, and they should, because in this industry, technology leadership is important."

© 1998 CMP Media, Inc.