Kryder immediately set an ambitious goal: demonstrate hard drives that could store four gigabits of information in a square inch of disk space. In 1990 the MTC became the Data Storage Systems Center (DSSC), one of a handful of NSF-funded engineering research centers. So, in 1987, after discussions with the National Science Foundation (NSF), he worked to create an organization that set a technological agenda. For the next five years, the center incubated increasingly efficient hard-drive technologies, while cultivating the field's top thinkers.īut the MTC tended to react to what the industry wanted, Kryder says, rather than pushing the envelope. The result in 1983: the Magnetics Technology Center (MTC), the only operation of its kind in the U.S. Next he persuaded businesses such as IBM and 3M to support an effort to develop those technologies. When the fledgling personal computer industry made the hard drive its storage device of choice, Kryder switched gears, assembled a conference of hard-drive industry gurus in 1982, and asked them to name their greatest research needs. When he joined Carnegie Mellon in 1978, Kryder continued his bubble memory work, but it became clear that the technology, used in cruise missiles and other niche applications, faced as obstacle as a mainstream product: gadolinium gallium garnet was expensive. Watson Research Center, where he researched bubble memory, which records data by magnetizing small circles on gadolinium gallium garnet. Later he spent five years at the IBM Thomas J. Kryder began exploring digital storage in the 1970s as a postdoc at the California Institute of Technology. Optimizing a drive for an Xbox or an automobile's diagnostic system is very different from creating a razor-thin, rugged one-inch drive for a flip phone. These advances are forcing manufacturers to become much more nimble as their markets expand. consumer will own 10 to 20 disk drives in devices that he uses regularly," Kryder predicts. Soon hard drives will migrate into phones, still cameras, PDAs, cars and everyday appliances. Now tiny, capacious hard drives are replacing low-capacity flash memory cards, which use electrically charged transistors rather than moving parts to record information.
#S AND S STORAGE TV#
Without them, Apple Computer's iTunes Music Store would not have sold hundreds of millions of songs and on-demand TV would still be a pipe dream.īut to Kryder, these new services are just the beginning. "Today the density of information we can get on a hard drive is much more important to enabling new applications than advances in semiconductors," Kryder remarks. Such devices may relegate Moore's Law to secondary status. "We completely missed seeing the iPod coming." Now, he points out, "disk drives are appearing in GPS systems for automobiles and enabling us to record and playback HDTV on TiVo and digital cable systems." "Who would have predicted the success of hand-held digital audio players?" Kryder asks. But these days, he says, altogether unexpected trends are afoot: smaller, high-capacity drives are spawning not only new products and applications but entirely new industries. As founder and director of Car-ne-gie Mellon University's Data Storage Systems Center and now as chief technology officer at hard-drive manufacturer Seagate Technology, he has often spearheaded the breakthroughs that have increased hard-disk densities (and accelerated their corresponding drop in price). Information storage has been Kryder's bailiwick most of his career. Without the continual squeezing of bits onto ever shrinking hard drives, the world of information as we know it today, and tomorrow, will come to a grinding halt. Kryder is not denigrating the importance of faster computer processors, but he says, at the very least, both digital elements need each other. Not even Moore's silicon chips can boast that kind of progress. That represents a 50-million-fold increase. Since the introduction of the disk drive in 1956, the density of information it can record has swelled from a paltry 2,000 bits to 100 billion bits (gigabits), all crowded in the small space of a square inch. The 61-year-old engineer might be on to something. But from where Mark Kryder sits, another force is at least as powerful, perhaps more: the cramming of as many bits as possible onto shrinking magnetic hard drives. Over the years there has been a lot of talk about Moore's Law and the way that doubling the power and memory of computer semiconductors every 18 months has driven technological advance.
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