Perfect Devices: The Amazing Endurance of Evolving Hard Disk Drives

I will describe the increase of areal density growth by over two orders of magnitude in the last decade, and how that areal density growth was invested almost exclusively in augmenting the capacity of the hard disk drive — in contrast with enhancing the logical data storage capabilities of the drive itself. I will then describe succinctly the technological advances that made the capacity progress feasible, as well as the barriers that emerge as the areal density increases. The second part of the talk would discuss new technologies under intense investigation, and new applications of hard disk drives. Research into the logical enhancement of the drive will wrap-up the lecture.

Presenter(s)

Dr. Giora Tarnopolsky is a data storage systems and magnetic recording expert, founder of TarnoTek, a technology and management consultancy in Palo Alto, California. He is data-storage-systems consultant to INSIC, the Information Storage Industry Consortium, and Contributing editor to Magnetics Business & Technology, the trade magazine.

TarnoTek clients include technology companies and venture capital partnerships. He lectures frequently on disk drive technology and data storage systems.

Prior to establishing TarnoTek, Dr. Tarnopolsky managed systems integration efforts at Seagate Technology, culminating on the demonstration of 100 Gb/in2 in longitudinal recording in 2001. At Seagate, where he was Executive Director of Advanced Recording Technology and of Research West, he developed and implemented quantitative methods of HDD design, and received an Outstanding Technical Contributor award for that work.

Earlier, Giora was a recording physics manager at Komag, Inc., and at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories. Giora is a Senior Member of the IEEE. He is a graduate of Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and holds a doctorate in Physics from Technion - Israel Institute of Technology.