Nano innovation keeps storage on top of the data explosion

Kathy Gibson reports from Pinnacle TechScape – The amount of data we are creating has exploded – and it’s not slowing down any time soon.

In fact, we are currently creating far more data that we can possibly store, says Kobus Burnett, country manager: South Africa at Seagate.

“Not only is data growing faster than our ability to store it, but we have now entered into a new era of unprecedented data creation.”

Burnett points out that in 2020, as the mobile cloud era took off, we needed 2 zettabytes of data. By 2029, in the AI era, its estimated that 527 zettabytes of data will be generated.

“Storage has been the backbone of the world’s digital infrastructure for so long that it’s practically invisible,” he adds. “Maybe that’s because it looks so simple on the outside.”

But storage is anything but simple: it uses some of the most complex nanoscale engineering and material science on the planet. “And the real work that happens in the hard drive is at the atomic level,” Burnett adds.

“The brains of the operation is a cutting-edge nanoscale chip rapidly moving data with finely tuned processors and custom algorithms, using millions of lines of code and some of the most complex hardware logic ever designed. A massive 4-billion bits of information are perfectly decoded and orchestrated every second.”

When recording or retrieving data, the rewrite heads move back and forth while maintaining a space of just 10 angstroms from the disk. “That’s about three water molecules,” Burnett explains. “And they do that while flying on a data track with a precision of less than three nanometers.”

But shrinking the bits further comes with a challenge: as the technology gets down to nano dimensions, the recording material becomes magnetically unstable, he adds.

“To solve that, we need storage layer with higher magnetic compressivity than today’s drives. So we came up with a groundbreaking new material in the superlattice structure, where every single atom is set exactly into place.

“To do that, we don’t just bring in a laser – we guide the light to a plasmonic transducer. These three-dimensional nanoscale structures combine to store data on the disk.”

To retrieve, a sophisticated magnetic sensor based on Nobel Prize-winning technology is used.

“This is post-nano engineering,” Burnett says. “It is where the future is.”

Increasing density will allow storage manufacturers like Seagate to produce the capacity to store the ever-increasing amounts of data being generated. Increasing capacity lets data centres store much more data on the same footprint, using less power.

Seagate already has solutions offering up to 80Tb per disk drive and will soon be able to support up to 200Tb per drive.

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