Technology solution for a better future.



magnetic hard disk drive architecture





Breaking news, June 2021



Drive solution to achieve high capacity of SMR and R/W ops of CMR. This technology solution relates to a magnetic recording method and data storage device solution for increasing areal density capability (ADC), drive capacity and write data rate or the number of random write operations per second (Wops) for a hard disk drive device. The invention also helps to manage how to write data in a hard disk drive to reduce failure rate and improve drive operation lifetime. The solution provides drive capacity gain of shingled magnetic recording (SMR), but without having to pay much for the latency penalty. The optimized drive architecture also enables HAMR drive to be implemented as a commercial product by enabling significant reliability improvement of the write head. Our approach provides 10X lifetime improvement as compared to Seagate's most advanced approach.





Please contact us if you are interested in licensing this technology.



MAGNET DESIGN FOR HIGH CAPACITY HDD





Improve HDD random access speed and lower the energy consumption, Jan 2021



Over the past two decades, human society went through a digitization process, and with increasing data produced an adoption for every aspect of human life. The demand for data storage has not slowed down. As data migrated into the cloud to further reduce the cost of data storage, the high-capacity HDD with a large number of platters is being utilized.


However, the scaling of HDD technology leads to a reduction of data temperature capability and increased energy utilized for each bit read/write operations. One of the poor scaling factors is the size/weight of the recording head assembly associated with the increasing number of platters per drive. The random-access speed is inversely proportional to the weight of the recording head assembly. Traditional stepping motor has to use higher driving current or larger magnet to compensate, which even with increased cost of materials and higher energy consumption, still will lead to slow down of the drive.





IBT has a unique magnet design that is able to improve HDD random access speed and lowers the energy consumption of the HDD by up to 20%. Currently this technology has been demonstrated in various fields, and received American Made Challenge award from US Department of Energy (DOE), Water Energy Technology Office.


Contact us for a licensing opportunities…



Data Temperature and Digital Universe





Kaizhong Gao, Ph. D., August, 2019



Data storage technologies have tremendous growth over the past few decades. Both hard disk drive (HDD) and Tape recording products have areal density growth for more than 1000 times within the past 25 years. Over the past decade, the size of the digital universe has grown exponentially and will continue to grow at approximately 40% per year in the next few years (according to IDC/EMC). One of the primary driving factors is the rapid adoption of mobile devices and network enabled sensors (or the internet of things, IOT). The low cost of computational chips and storage devices enabled rapid adoption of various devices across many industries and consumer markets. Many storage technologies have emerged such as NAND based solid state drive (SSD) began to take over part of the traditional HDD market. The most recent announcement of 3D NAND based SSD has the device capacity well exceed 100 Terabytes (TB), far exceeding current HDD product at 16 TB/unit. The storage class SSD became mainstream that taking over traditional high performance HDD data storage market.





Data Temperature in a Storage Device



To understand how to manage big data storage and where each data storage technology fit into the big picture, relevant data storage theory and a universal standard needs to be established. Here we give a standard “data temperature” definition:





where one year is approximately equals to 31,557,600 seconds. This data temperature, in unit of degree G (ºG), can be utilized as a standard measure to determine one aspect of data property, i.e. how often the data needs to be assessed, in storage devices/systems. The access is defined as either a read or a write operation. Here we do not differentiate read and write operations. Under this standard data temperature definition. if a file is accessed yearly, daily or in every second, then its data temperature is at approximately 0 ºG, 25 ºG and 75 ºG respectively.


With this definition, we can identify universal evolution of the digital universe. In certain ways, this evolution of digital universe shares the same trait as the physical universe, which leads to profound impact to human society. Some of the discussions have been shared with google talk.



International Business and Technology Service Corporation (IBTSC)


North Oaks, MN 55127