Seagate’s HAMR to change the face of gaming industry?

We are all familiar with microtransactions. For all its worth, we could be seeing here the future of videogaming which is digital distribution. It would be remembered that back in July of last year, manufacturer Seagate patented HAMR or heat-assisted magnetic recording that could have drastic impacts to the industry.

HAMR, if you’re not well familiar with it, is a technology based on nanotube lubrication to allow the read/write head of a disk to get closer to the surface and store more information. It allows a total number of 300 TB of information on a standard 3.5″ drive and that would be roughly around 6,144 50GB Blu-ray discs.

Seagate disclosed that HAMR is just the first of a two part process. The company’s head of Interfaces and Architecture, Eric Reider, explained:

HAMR helps with the writing process. Bit patterning allows us to create the media. Each bit is represented by an island of about 50 magnetic grains, but these patches are irregularly shaped, like ink on newsprint. By chemically encoding an organized molecular pattern onto the platter’s substrate at the moment of creation, however, HAMR can put a single bit on every grain.

We quite honestly didn’t catch most of that but in short, they’ve perfected the technology. They mentioned further that this technology is expected to become widely available by 2010 which is rather interesting because we’re all expecting a batch of new gen of consoles by then.

Via Wired

We are all familiar with microtransactions. For all its worth, we could be seeing here the future of videogaming which is digital distribution. It would be remembered that back in July of last year, manufacturer Seagate patented HAMR or heat-assisted magnetic recording that could have drastic impacts to the industry.

HAMR, if you’re not well familiar with it, is a technology based on nanotube lubrication to allow the read/write head of a disk to get closer to the surface and store more information. It allows a total number of 300 TB of information on a standard 3.5″ drive and that would be roughly around 6,144 50GB Blu-ray discs.

Seagate disclosed that HAMR is just the first of a two part process. The company’s head of Interfaces and Architecture, Eric Reider, explained:

HAMR helps with the writing process. Bit patterning allows us to create the media. Each bit is represented by an island of about 50 magnetic grains, but these patches are irregularly shaped, like ink on newsprint. By chemically encoding an organized molecular pattern onto the platter’s substrate at the moment of creation, however, HAMR can put a single bit on every grain.

We quite honestly didn’t catch most of that but in short, they’ve perfected the technology. They mentioned further that this technology is expected to become widely available by 2010 which is rather interesting because we’re all expecting a batch of new gen of consoles by then.

Via Wired