No. They are almost certainly flat within 3 micrometers, maybe a bit better. Optically (high grade) flat is in within 10 nanometers.
That or better.
Serious through optical grade lapping is done with known surface parameters and fluid suspended abrasives. Jewlers rouge (used to be in a filled fabric) is still to coarse for current optical(ly) flat standards.
So what is it that you really want to do (What widget do you need for = what you plan to make)?
?-)
moves
=20
=20
Head flying height of 100 angstroms (10 nanometers)? I doubt that is so little as 1 micron (1000 nm). Of course if you have backup i can be convinced easily. I am occasionally wowed by the areal densities achieved. But there more dimensions to that.
YCLIU. You can't focus a magnetic field--unlike a light beam, it always expands as it gets away from the pole pieces. I invite you to do the math on how small the bits have to be, in order to get 1 TB on a platter.
IBM Research, my PPOE, contributed most of the technical advances in hard disks for many years. Until quite recently, my next-door lab neighour was Ed Yarmchuk, who was one of the pillars of that effort--he is a head-disk interface expert and the inventor of self-servowriting.
So although I've only done disk work in firefighting mode myself, I've rubbed shoulders with some of the greats in that business.
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
-- Dr Philip C D Hobbs Principal Consultant ElectroOptical Innovations LLC Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics 160 North State Road #203 Briarcliff Manor NY 10510 845-480-2058 email: hobbs (atsign) electrooptical (period) net http://electrooptical.net
They (IBM) did ALL of the current MR head technology. I think we are at like 37Mb/lineal inch (and have been for about 6 years)
What we now use IS the result of IBM's work, and the state of the art stopped advancing when they sold their division to Hitachi. IBM's work IS the state of the art.
We would appear to be moving to solid state mass storage technologies, but we all know that hard drives will be around for a while yet.
I just do not think they will advance much further as far as lineal write density or even areal density goes. They are already at the edge of the limits of the topology.
We may see things like nine drive RAID 5 blocks being made where a lost drive is far less vulnerable than a huge multi-platter single drive. We are already there, but you should start seeing such arrays being sold as single chassis elements, instead of having to assemble them yourself. Little RAID towers as it were.
So, an SAS 1.5 inch form factor array could be a stack smaller than the footprint of a laptop drive, area wise. It would look like a small "Jenga" stack.
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