Posted Jan 03, 2007 at 02:04AM by Ryan A. Listed in: Wii, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, MMORPG, Games for Windows Tags: Seagate Technology, nanotube, HAMR
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hdWe are all familiar with microtransactions. For all its worth, we could be seeing here the future of videogaming which is digital distribution. It would be remembered that back in July of last year, manufacturer Seagate patented HAMR or heat-assisted magnetic recording that could have drastic impacts to the industry.

HAMR, if you're not well familiar with it, is a technology based on nanotube lubrication to allow the read/write head of a disk to get closer to the surface and store more information. It allows a total number of 300 TB of information on a standard 3.5" drive and that would be roughly around 6,144 50GB Blu-ray discs.

Seagate disclosed that HAMR is just the first of a two part process. The company's head of Interfaces and Architecture, Eric Reider, explained:

HAMR helps with the writing process. Bit patterning allows us to create the media. Each bit is represented by an island of about 50 magnetic grains, but these patches are irregularly shaped, like ink on newsprint. By chemically encoding an organized molecular pattern onto the platter's substrate at the moment of creation, however, HAMR can put a single bit on every grain.


We quite honestly didn't catch most of that but in short, they've perfected the technology. They mentioned further that this technology is expected to become widely available by 2010 which is rather interesting because we're all expecting a batch of new gen of consoles by then.


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6 Comments


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   by KirbySS (Unregistered) - 2007-01-03
 » .

I would love to have one of those in my compy.


   Re: ahhhhhhhhh (Unregistered) - 2007-01-03
 » holy *****

300 Terabytes!!!!!!! 300 Terabytes!!!!! That's 300,000 Gigs.
   by Advertising -
   by Eddy (Unregistered) - 2007-01-03
 » Doesn't make sense to me..

They say they only need one grain per bit instead of fifty. How does that give us 300 TB disks? You would need to apply this technology to a 6 TB disk to get one. I haven't seen many of those around!

That other technology must give, like, a 10x compression of data per surface area, in order for them to achieve these claims..

   by Hoonatic - 2007-01-03
 » Read speed

It's all very well being able to store 300Tb, but if the read speeds don't increase in step with the storage space then seek speeds will increase dramatically and it won't be much use for consoles.
Also, formatting one of these suckers is going to take a couple of weeks!!

   by Duh (Unregistered) - 2007-01-03
 » 2010?

"...We're all expecting a batch of new gen of consoles by then."

Uh...I don't think so....

   by yonith (Unregistered) - 2007-01-03
 » hmmm

yeahhh so what about this...

http://www.tgdaily.com/2007/01/03/oem_holographic_drive/



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