Magnetic recording advances at a rate exceeding Moore's law. Barriers that were thought to be real even a few years ago, proved to be movable or surmountable.
Storage capacity is cheaper than ever before.
To continue advances in capacity and performance at this neck breaking pace, it is thought that combinations of optical and magnetic approaches may be needed. In this talk we will address fundamental issues in data storage technology, and potential opportunities to continue the fast growth path. At the heart of the technology is a flying head assembly, a mere 15 nm above the surface of the disk. Flying under these conditions puts severe constraints on the head-disk interface. In addition, in some of the proposed storage schemes, a fluid at temperatures of over 600C is located underneath the head, at a distance of 25 to 50 nm, potentially severely impacting the head-media interaction.