Taking A Giant Leap Into The Future Of Data Storage Technology: Understanding The Various Features And Characteristics Of Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording(HAMR) Technology

No doubt if somehow by some unbelievable happenstance you woke up today as a time traveler coming from the future, say from the year 3000 back to our present day 2018, you would probably have a hard time trying to comprehend how exactly it is that we're using such outdated forms of technology in our world today, of which of course data storage technology isn't left out.

Our generation has somehow managed to survive the past days of floppy discs, zip drives and other outdated forms of data storage, something which we tend to laugh at today whenever we remember those days as we continue to enjoy our hard drives and USB sticks today. But who knows how many decades it'll take the next generation to make our present generation a laughing stock in terms of technological advancement? lol

For several decades up till now scientists, technologists and researchers have continued to overwork their brains and asses in search of newer methods which could have upgrades in terms of reliability, capacity, efficiency, performance and of course reduced physical sizes.

This is clearly evident in the increased performance, efficiency and an overall size reduction in data storage devices produced in recent years. And with the current rate of data production there is need for even more reliable devices to house the humongous amounts of data we humans all have to store, and of course the use of flash drives and USB sticks just won't cut it here.

So today I'll be talking about a highly promising but yet to be released technology which offers real hope and promise as far as data storage technology is concerned. It is called or termed "HEAT-ASSISTED MAGNETIC RECORDING" or simply HAMR for short. So what exactly is Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording?

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WHAT EXACTLY IS HEAT-ASSISTED MAGNETIC RECORDING(HAMR)?

Heat-assisted magnetic recording is an emerging and highly promising technology with the potential to ensure density increments in future or next generation magnetic hard disk drives, which simply put, means it is a technology which greatly increases to a large extent the amount of data can be stored on a magnetic device, for example a hard disk drive.

So how exactly does this HAMR technology work? Well, simply put it involves heating up a tiny spot/area on a magnetic disk where the data is to be written and the heating job is done with the aid of a small laser attached to the recording head. This thus enables a smaller cell of bits to be encoded or written as either a 0 or a 1. The size of this smaller bit sized cells will allow more bits to be retained per unit area thus increasing the areal density of the data while also increasing the total magnetic drive capacity.

Of course the above process seems really simple as it appears to be devoid of any major complexity, but you're actually wrong as the science, engineering, experimentation and expertise needed to achieve this very purpose is really enormous to say the least, but this is just me trying to keep it relatively short and simple thus sparing you too much detail.

But talking about detail, here's some for you; The media is temporarily heated during the recording process thus allowing for the media coercivity to be lowered considerably below the available already applied magnetic write field which also consequently allows for a much higher media anisotropy and smaller grains which are thermally stable.

After rapid cooling of the heated region has been carried out in the presence of the applied head field, the orientation of the head field then helps to encode the recorded data, thus the media is written when hot and stored when cold, although the entire process of heating, writing and cooling takes less than 1 nanosecond. This whole data writing process done in HAMR systems shows a striking resemblance and similarity to magneto-optical recording, although the data reading is done with a magnetoresistive element.

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Written below are the steps or things you need to do in order to design a HAMR drive.

DESIGNING A HAMR DRIVE

To build a HAMR drive you do the following;

1. Add a laser diode to the applied head.
2. Create or develop an optical route which would help drive the light from the laser to the NFT(Plasmonic near-field transducer).
3. Proceed to integrate NFT's into the recording head.
4. Develop a new fully functional HAMR media.
5. Proceed to modify the firmware on the drive and in the corresponding test systems.
6. Adjust a suitable manufacturing process to effectively and efficiently accommodate HAMR.
7. Lastly, do the millions of other things that engineers have spent uncountable hours developing and still trying to develop lol.
   
   HAMR technology would soon be fully employed in the general production of drives because unlike it's predecessors it has certain cutting edge advantages such as;
   A)Increased data density
   B)Increased/improved thermal stability
   C)Increased diffraction limits

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These are all very important advantages as they have led to the development of higher capacity hard drives; Drives from the future which are technologically more advanced than what our present day technology can afford to give us right now.

In conclusion therefore, it is quite obvious that HAMR which the "Advanced Storage Technology Consortium" has referred to as the next significant storage technological innovation is here to stay and will indeed help exponentially increase the rapid growth and development of future hard drive products for decades or more to come.

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Thanks for stopping by to read this and please feel free to express your personal thoughts and opinions in the comment section below :)

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