Future Watch

10-Times-Better Hard Drives

Dave Andrews

Coming in early 1998: new mass-storage products that offer hard drive-like performance at a lower cost per gigabyte than magnetic, magneto-optical (MO), and tape formats, and 10 times the storage capacity of current hard drives. A company called TeraStor (San Jose, CA, http://www.terastor.com ) hopes the first of these products, which are based on near-field recording, will appear early next year. Initial capacities of 20 GB per surface are predicted.

Near-field recording relies on several techniques ( see the figure ), but the most important is the solid immersion lens, which al lows for a reduced bit-cell size that lets you fit about 10 times more data onto a surface than is possible with hard drives.

According to TeraStor officials, with their fast performance, reasonable cost, and high-data-density capabilities, near-field-recording devices will replace a host of storage media in use today for a variety of applications, including tape for archiving.

"What TeraStor is doing is quite interesting and seems possible," says Bob Katzive, vice president of Disk/Trend (Mountain View, CA), a storage-market-research firm. "If the company releases it on time, at a reasonable cost, with good manufacturing partners, it could threaten a variety of storage technologies.

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Architecture of TeraStor's Near-Field Technology

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