Thread: The future of hard disks

While some people think Flash drives are the future, some engineers disagree. Those who hold the technology close to their heart still have a few tricks up their sleeves. One is thermally assisted recording (TAR), which uses a laser to heat up the recording media while the head is writing the bits of data. This allows the use of small magnetic grains, increasing the density of storage. Another path to higher densities is to use patterned media.



On current disks, each recorded bit is made up of many random grains on the platter's surface - in patterned media, the magnetic layer is created as an ordered array of highly uniform islands, each island capable of storing an individual bit. What's certain is that despite reports of their impending demise, hard drives will be around for a long time yet.