Perpendicular recording has become a technology we hear about every other day now as new hardrives with higher capacity arrive all the time. Especially with the på 2.5″ market perpendicular recording has given us a lot more storage capacity. But many might wonder what perpendicular recording really is. It’s all about how the data is stored as magnetic particles. In a regular harddrive the data is stored horizontally on the platter while with perpendicular recording the data is stored vertically, making it possible to store more data on the same area. The technology is also a great way for manufacturers to work around one of the biggest problems with the harddrive technology; super-paramagnetic effect (SPE). This effect can appear with very small magnetically charged particles used by harddrives.
“Many theories have cropped up over the years as to what density magnetic particles (described by a disks areal density) may achieve before becoming subject to SPE. At present it is suggested that anything from 100Gbit/inch2 to 150Gbit/inch2 is the physical limitation for longitudinal Hard Disk Drives, although perpendicular media solutions have been made as high as 230Gbit/inch2.”
Perpendicular recording is without a doubt an important technology to harddrive manufacturers, but it is no miracle and SPE will strike here sooner or later as well, and then they will have to find new solutions to increase the capacity and performance of the harddrives.
