Of pixie dust and crystal cubes By Wayne Glynne, Storage Business Manager, IBM Australia and New Zealand The march of invention has clothed mankind with powers of which a century ago the boldest imagination could not have dreamt. Henry George Mad scientists, inventors, philosophers and dreamers have one thing in the common. They are the ones who believe that the impossible is simply something no one has thought of yet. They are the ones who aren t content with asking Why, instead they ask the much more profound question, Why not? In the last hundred years, technological breakthroughs have come along hard and fast, especially in the area of computing and data storage. Gone are the days of massive leather bound books maintained by scribes with feather pens and ink. This generation will see both becoming faster, smaller and cheaper every year. Children are growing up learning to use the computer keyboard at the same time they learn to write. The technology revolution is driving a social one when language is subtly changing to accommodate the new gizmos at our beck and call. A notebook is more likely to be a laptop computer, a hard drive is a storage device and has nothing to do with cars, and personal assistants have given way to handheld digital ones. The story of the humble disk drive The spirit of innovation and the ability to see beyond what is possible today to what could be tomorrow is what makes inventors of researchers, and raises industry leaders from mere players and followers. In the area of data storage, IBM Research is the undisputed leader. The world has come a long way since Danish scientist Valdemar Poulsen invented the world s first magnetic recording device, an answering machine called the Telegraphone in 1898. IBM researchers brought it to the modern commercial world by inventing the world s first magnetic tape drive in 1952 and the first disk drive in 1956. Introduced on 13 September 1956, the world's first commercial hard-disk drive - 305 RAMAC (Random Access Method of Accounting and Control) had a total capacity of only five Megabytes compared to an average PC today which has a disk drive of 20 GB! But it marked the beginning of the use of disk drive systems as the most cost-effective way to store large amounts of computer data that had to be accessed frequently
1956 On September 13, 1956 a small team of IBM engineers in San Jose introduced the first computer disk storage system. The 305 RAMAC (Random Access Method of Accounting and Control) could store five million characters (five megabytes) of data on 50 disks, each 24 inches in diameter. RAMAC's revolutionary recording head could go directly to any location on a disk surface without reading all the information in between. Today, IBM scientists continue to explore new technologies to enable ever-denser, faster and more reliable disk-drive products, as well as a variety of future technologies that may one day lead to entirely new kinds of storage devices. Even notebook computer disk drives have capacities of up to 48GB, and the IBM Microdrive (smaller than a chicken egg) boasts One GB alone. 1999 Microdrive The world's smallest and lightest hard disk drive with capacities of up to One GB the IBM Microdrive began shipping in volume in 1999. Weighing only 16 grams, the IBM Microdrive is changing the shape of digital cameras, video cameras, companion PCs, and notebook computers. Do we need all this storage capacity? Yes, we do. In a study released by the UC Berkeley s School of Information Management and System last year, they estimated that between one to two exabytes (10 18 bytes) of unique data is produced each year. Put another way, it is roughly equivalent to 250 megabytes of data for every man, woman and child on earth!
Pixie dust - a little bit of magic In the past decade, the data density for magnetic hard disk drives has increased at a phenomenal pace doubling every 18 months and, since 1997, doubling every year. In order to increase the capacity of disk drives using a similar form factor, the data density the number of bits of data per square inch - becomes critical. However, when magnetic regions on the disk become too small, they cannot retain their magnetic orientations - the data - over the typical lifetime of the product. This is called the "superparamagnetic effect," and has long been predicted to appear when densities reached 20 to 40 billion bits (gigabits) per square inch, which is near the data density of current products. The solution? Believe it or not, a little pixie dust. In May 2001, IBM announced that it had produced a revolutionary new type of magnetic coating - known as "antiferromagnetically-coupled (AFC) media - that is eventually expected to quadruple the data density of current hard disk drive products to 100 gigabits per square inch by 2003. The key to IBM's new data storage breakthrough is a three-atom-thick layer of the element ruthenium, a precious metal similar to platinum, sandwiched between two magnetic layers. That only a few atoms could have such a dramatic impact caused some IBM scientists to refer to the ruthenium layer informally as pixie dust. 2001 Pixie dust to the rescue AFC media is expected to increase current areal density limits by fourfold, to surpass 100 gigabits/inch 2, a level once thought impossible. Continued growth of data density is crucial to feed the informationhungry Internet economy and help hasten the transition in home entertainment from passive analog technologies to interactive digital formats. IBM's Travelstar laptop hard disk drive is the industry's first with a new magnetic data storage media called antiferromagnetically-coupled (AFC) media. For the person in the street, this means a quantum leap improvement in disk drive capacities for both home and business use:
?? Desktop drives of up to 400 gigabytes (GB) or the information in 400,000 books?? Notebook drives -- 200 GB, equivalent to 42 DVDs or more than 300 CDs?? IBM's one-inch Microdrive -- 6 GB or 13 hours of MPEG-4 compressed digital video (about eight complete movies) for handheld devices. Looking into a crystal cube While the pixie dust technology has stretched the boundaries of traditional magnetic-disk-drive technology, research teams are exploring alternative approaches like holographic storage to achieve substantially higher storage densities and product-level performance. Storing data as holograms has intrigued scientists for decades, and the world's first working holographic data storage system a write-once system using photographic film for the U.S. Air Force was developed by IBM in the early 1960s. Work continues today to make holographic storage a viable option in the commercial world. How does it work? A traditional hologram is produced when a beam of laser light, the reference beam, interferes with another beam reflected from the object to be recorded. The pattern of interference is captured by photographic film, a light-sensitive crystal or some other optical material. Illuminating this pattern by the reference beam reproduces a threedimensional image of the object. Each viewing angle gives you a different view of the same object. Holographic data storage works in exactly the same way. But for every angle, instead of having another view of the object, there is a completely different page of information. Up to 10,000 pages have been stored in a single cube of recording material one centimetre on a side. Each page contains one megabit of information, which means that the cube can store about 10 gigabits! Holographic recording has the advantage of being inherently parallel. It reads and stores an entire page at a time. The technology permits data rates of up to one gigabit (or 125 megabytes) per second, making it ideal for storing image data. Another advantage of holographic storage, largely untapped, lies in its use as associative memory. Just as illuminating a hologram with a reference beam recovers the stored information, illuminating it with a pattern of information will reproduce the corresponding reference beam and angle, which immediately identifies the page on which the information is stored. In other words, holographic memories can be searched extremely fast for data patterns. What will the future hold? There is more at stake today than simply keeping up with demand. As drives become smaller, cheaper and more capacious, new applications will become feasible.
In the not so distant future, it may become commonplace for people to wear a variety of electronic devices, all communicating with each other and demanding more storage. Combined with a voice-activated user interface and connected into a person's wearable personal area network, a digital diary could identify that oh-so-familiar face at a party or show you where you left your car keys. What may only be a dream today has often been the starting point of the world s most important inventions. As the Walt Disney once said, If you can dream it, you can do it.