Fujitsu boffins make hard-drive breakthrough

MAKER OF computer bits Fujitsu claims that it has worked out a way of focusing a laser on a rotating disk just 80 nanometres across.

The announcement means that Fujitsu, which has always been a poor cousin to the likes of Toshiba and Seagate, might steal a march on its competitors in the race to jack up the areal density of hard drives past the theoretical 1TB per inch maximum.

A spokesFujitsu said its method involved a small heater, a tiny fridge and an optical reading mechanism.

The optical reader replaces a magnetic one which spots the point on the spinning disk. Fujitsu boffins Koji Matsumoto, Akihiro Inomata, and Shin-ya Hasegawa, told BetaNews that most of the barriers to putting data onto the disk was to do with the size of ferromagnetic grains. While these can be made jolly small, if they get too tiny they lose their magnetic charge.

Writing data to them means that the grains heat up. This helps the disk retain data; but over time, as they gradually cool there is a good bet it will lose it all again. Fujitsu's big idea is that heat the material as hot as you can get it before it loses its magnetism and then rapidly cool it.

Although the idea worked on paper building a laser that could do the task was a major hurdle which Fujitsu thinks it has cracked.

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