By Simon Belt
It should soon be possible to store the digital photograph of everyone on the planet on a hard disk the size of a single compact disc, the BA Festival of Science was told on Thursday.
Advances in hard drive technology are extremely challenging due to the demands that size places on the technology, said Dr Tom McLaughlin from Seagate, the world's largest disk drive manufacturer.
“To make an analogy, it’s like taking a Jumbo jet travelling at 800 times the speed of sound, less than a centimetre above the ground and asking it to record every blade of grass that it flies over with an error of no less than 10 blades of grass in an area the size of Yorkshire!”
The future of hard drive manafacture now lies with nanotechnology. Gaps between the reading and writing heads of the devices are now as little as 10 nanometres or 10,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair.
Such technology also exploits the properties of materials at the multi-layer scale.
Elements such as Nickel and Iron can be combined together to yield layers containing just a few million atoms which have the right magnetic properties for hard drive recording.
Hard drives found in cars, TVs, mobile phones, cameras and domestic appliances represent a $40 billion industry, said Dr McLaughlin.
“The explosion in information worldwide and the demand for more robust information storage is driving new technologies for smaller and smaller hard drives.”
Since 1973 when IBM revealed the first hard drive capable of storing 60 MB of data, technological advances now permit data storage of up to 750 GB. This corresponds to a 3 million times increase in capacity, while at the same time, a thousand times reduction in size.