The Register®  Original URL:  Hitachi kicks open Door 4 in the
House of Spinning Platters  Enter the Microwave Magnetic Dragon
By Chris Mellor  Posted in Storage, 1st December 2010 13:43 GMT
The post-perpendicular magnetic recording world in the land of
spinning disks had three land masses; HAMR, BPM and Shingled
Writing. Now there's a fourth; microwave magnetic recording
(MMR).  Hitachi, with its GST hard disk drive (HDD) subsidiary,
has been working with Japan's NEDO (New Energy and Industrial
Technology Development Organisation) to see if microwaves can be
used to extend the life of today's perpendicular magnetic
recording (PMR) beyond the 800Gbit/in2 - 1Tbit/in2 limit where
the constant magnetic field of a recorded bit becomes unstable
due to susceptibility to temperature fluctuations and the
influence of neighbouring bits.  A kind of consensus had been
emerging that the overlapped tracks idea of Shingled Writes
could extend the life of PMR to possibly 1.5Tbit/in2 and maybe
beyond. Heat-assisted magneti