Gadgetory

if you're going to be in the market for a hard drive in the next couple years then you're going to experience hammer time and no I'm not talking about a hard drive that plays rap music and wears parachute pants today's video is about heat assisted magnetic recording or hammer which will greatly increase drive capacities you might already know that data on a hard drive is stored by tiny magnetic grains that sit on the disk platters a group of these grains can store one bit that's a 0 or 1 depending on which way it is turned when you write something on to your hard drive the drives head will apply a magnetic field to turn the grain in a certain way that's what stored data is but as hard drives have gotten more and more spacious over the years manufacturers have gotten into the problem where magnetic grains can only be made so small before they become unstable and start flipping randomly limiting the amount of data that you could fit onto one hard drive but as it turns out heating the disk can make the bits more stable by decreasing the platters coercivity what this means in practical terms is that the heat makes it easier for the drive head to turn the grain correctly so that data is recorded accurately hammer drives do this by using a tiny laser smaller than a grain of salt on the read/write head but because you can't focus a laser down to the size of a bit on the platter the laser instead is absorbed by something called a near field transducer or NFT a technology that's only been around since the 1990s the MFT converts the laser light into something called surface plasmons which are basically small electrical currents that travel down the NFT and heat a small area of the disk up to 400 to 500 degrees Celsius however the disk cools as soon as the write is complete so you won't have to worry about some sort of catastrophic Drive meltdown so this means another thing you probably won't have to worry about is running out of space after hammers introduction in 2018 or 2019 its projected to provide 20 terabytes of storage on one Drive starting at around 2020 and increase this capacity to about 30 to 40 percent year after year all the way up to 100 terabytes on a single Drive when it's combined with bit patterned media which is a technology that allows a bit to be stored on just one single grain rather than a group of grains which will increase data density all right Luke that sounds like quite a bit of space for all my junk but won't that hit my wallet quite hard actually hammer drives aren't projected to be more expensive than current drives when you take capacity into account as you wouldn't need as many platters to hold the amount of data that you would want which would reduce the cost since hammer is a technology for spinning hard drives hammer disks won't exactly be as fast as SSDs but you could see at 10 to 15 percent performance increase simply due to the higher data density since the read/write head can access more data in one rotation of the disk so keep an eye out for hammer drives in the next couple of years if you keep running out of space and although this episode was not sponsored we'd like to thank our friends over at Seagate for giving us some help with the information on this edition of tech quickie fresh books is on a mission to make freelancers less stressed and more organized through their easy-to-use tool for crafting and sending professional invoices in seconds they also do a bunch of other stuff first books helps you track in your hours so that when it comes time to create set invoice you know exactly what you did when you did it who you did it for all that kind of stuff you can accept deposits through their platform so you get paid for your swore on your schedule which is actually quite nice and they also have a tool to manage your expense reports their mobile app lets you take a picture of your receipts and pretty much handles the rest which is nice because that can be really annoying getting started on fresh books is extremely simple even if you're not a numbers person so don't worry about it you can try fresh books for free for 30 days by going to fresh books calm forward slash tech quickie and entering tech quickie and how did you hear about us section if you liked the video like it if you just liked the video dislike it let me know in the comment section down below if there's other things you'd like us to check out on tech wiki don't forget to subscribe and also check out channel super-fun why I don't know I'm out of ideas I'm leaving