Magnetic storage or magnetic recording is the storage of
data
In the pursuit of knowledge, data (; ) is a collection of discrete values that convey information, describing quantity, quality, fact, statistics, other basic units of meaning, or simply sequences of symbols that may be further interpret ...
on a
magnet
A magnet is a material or object that produces a magnetic field. This magnetic field is invisible but is responsible for the most notable property of a magnet: a force that pulls on other ferromagnetic materials, such as iron, steel, nic ...
ized medium. Magnetic storage uses different patterns of
magnetisation in a magnetizable material to store data and is a form of
non-volatile memory
Non-volatile memory (NVM) or non-volatile storage is a type of computer memory that can retain stored information even after power is removed. In contrast, volatile memory needs constant power in order to retain data.
Non-volatile memory typ ...
. The information is accessed using one or more
read/write heads.
Magnetic storage media, primarily
hard disk
A hard disk drive (HDD), hard disk, hard drive, or fixed disk is an electro-mechanical data storage device that stores and retrieves digital data using magnetic storage with one or more rigid rapidly rotating platters coated with mag ...
s, are widely used to store
computer data
In computer science, data (treated as singular, plural, or as a mass noun) is any sequence of one or more symbols; datum is a single symbol of data. Data requires interpretation to become information. Digital data is data that is represented ...
as well as
audio
Audio most commonly refers to sound, as it is transmitted in signal form. It may also refer to:
Sound
*Audio signal, an electrical representation of sound
*Audio frequency, a frequency in the audio spectrum
* Digital audio, representation of soun ...
and
video
Video is an Electronics, electronic medium for the recording, copying, playback, broadcasting, and display of moving picture, moving image, visual Media (communication), media. Video was first developed for mechanical television systems, whi ...
signals. In the field of computing, the term ''magnetic storage'' is preferred and in the field of audio and video production, the term ''magnetic recording'' is more commonly used. The distinction is less technical and more a matter of preference. Other examples of magnetic storage media include
floppy disk
A floppy disk or floppy diskette (casually referred to as a floppy, or a diskette) is an obsolescent type of disk storage composed of a thin and flexible disk of a magnetic storage medium in a square or nearly square plastic enclosure lined ...
s,
magnetic tape
Magnetic tape is a medium for magnetic storage made of a thin, magnetizable coating on a long, narrow strip of plastic film. It was developed in Germany in 1928, based on the earlier magnetic wire recording from Denmark. Devices that use mag ...
, and
magnetic stripes
The term digital card can refer to a physical item, such as a memory card on a camera, or, increasingly since 2017, to the digital content hosted
as a virtual card or cloud card, as a digital virtual representation of a physical card. They share ...
on credit cards.
History
Magnetic storage in the form of
wire recording
Wire recording or magnetic wire recording was the first magnetic recording technology, an analog type of audio storage in which a magnetic recording is made on a thin steel wire. The first crude magnetic recorder was invented in 1898 by Val ...
—audio recording on a wire—was publicized by
Oberlin Smith
Oberlin Smith (March 22, 1840 – July 19, 1926) was an American engineer who published one of the earliest works dealing with magnetic recording in 1888.
Biography
He was born on March 22, 1840, in Cincinnati, Ohio, to George R. and Salome (Kemp ...
in the Sept 8, 1888 issue of ''Electrical World''.
Smith had previously filed a patent in September, 1878 but found no opportunity to pursue the idea as his business was machine tools. The first publicly demonstrated
(Paris Exposition of 1900) magnetic recorder was invented by
Valdemar Poulsen
Valdemar Poulsen (23 November 1869 – 23 July 1942) was a Danish engineer who made significant contributions to early radio technology. He developed a magnetic wire recorder called the telegraphone in 1898 and the first continuous wave rad ...
in 1898. Poulsen's device recorded a
signal
In signal processing, a signal is a function that conveys information about a phenomenon. Any quantity that can vary over space or time can be used as a signal to share messages between observers. The '' IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing' ...
on a wire wrapped around a drum. In 1928,
Fritz Pfleumer developed the first magnetic
tape recorder
An audio tape recorder, also known as a tape deck, tape player or tape machine or simply a tape recorder, is a sound recording and reproduction device that records and plays back sounds usually using magnetic tape for storage. In its present ...
. Early magnetic storage devices were designed to record
analog
Analog or analogue may refer to:
Computing and electronics
* Analog signal, in which information is encoded in a continuous variable
** Analog device, an apparatus that operates on analog signals
*** Analog electronics, circuits which use analo ...
audio signals. Computers and now most audio and video magnetic storage devices record
digital data
Digital data, in information theory and information systems, is information represented as a string of discrete symbols each of which can take on one of only a finite number of values from some alphabet, such as letters or digits. An example is ...
.
In computers, magnetic storage was also used for
primary storage
Computer data storage is a technology consisting of computer components and recording media that are used to retain digital data. It is a core function and fundamental component of computers.
The central processing unit (CPU) of a comput ...
in a form of
magnetic drum
Drum memory was a magnetic data storage device invented by Gustav Tauschek in 1932 in Austria. Drums were widely used in the 1950s and into the 1960s as computer memory.
For many early computers, drum memory formed the main working memory o ...
, or
core memory
Core or cores may refer to:
Science and technology
* Core (anatomy), everything except the appendages
* Core (manufacturing), used in casting and molding
* Core (optical fiber), the signal-carrying portion of an optical fiber
* Core, the centr ...
,
core rope memory
Core rope memory is a form of read-only memory (ROM) for computers, first used in the 1960s by early NASA Mars space probes and then in the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) and programmed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Ins ...
,
thin film memory
Thin-film memory is a high-speed alternative to core memory developed by Sperry Rand in a government-funded research project.
Instead of threading individual ferrite cores on wires, thin-film memory consisted of 4-micrometre thick dots of p ...
,
twistor memory
Twistor memory is a form of computer memory formed by wrapping magnetic tape around a current-carrying wire. Operationally, twistor was very similar to core memory. Twistor could also be used to make ROM memories, including a re-programmable for ...
or
bubble memory
Bubble memory is a type of non-volatile computer memory that uses a thin film of a magnetic material to hold small magnetized areas, known as ''bubbles'' or ''domains'', each storing one bit of data. The material is arranged to form a series o ...
. Unlike modern computers, magnetic tape was also often used for secondary storage.
Design
Information is written to and read from the storage medium as it moves past devices called
read-and-write heads that operate very close (often tens of nanometers) over the magnetic surface. The read-and-write head is used to detect and modify the magnetisation of the material immediately under it. There are two magnetic polarities, each of which is used to represent either 0 or 1.
The magnetic surface is conceptually divided into many small sub-
micrometer Micrometer can mean:
* Micrometer (device), used for accurate measurements by means of a calibrated screw
* American spelling of micrometre
The micrometre ( international spelling as used by the International Bureau of Weights and Measures; ...
-sized magnetic regions, referred to as magnetic domains, (although these are not
magnetic domains
A magnetic domain is a region within a magnetic material in which the magnetization is in a uniform direction. This means that the individual magnetic moments of the atoms are aligned with one another and they point in the same direction. When c ...
in a rigorous physical sense), each of which has a mostly uniform magnetisation. Due to the
polycrystal
A crystallite is a small or even microscopic crystal which forms, for example, during the cooling of many materials. Crystallites are also referred to as grains.
Bacillite is a type of crystallite. It is rodlike with parallel longulites.
Stru ...
line nature of the magnetic material, each of these magnetic regions is composed of a few hundred magnetic
grains. Magnetic grains are typically 10 nm in size and each form a single true
magnetic domain
A magnetic domain is a region within a magnetic material in which the magnetization is in a uniform direction. This means that the individual magnetic moments of the atoms are aligned with one another and they point in the same direction. When c ...
. Each magnetic region in total forms a
magnetic dipole
In electromagnetism, a magnetic dipole is the limit of either a closed loop of electric current or a pair of poles as the size of the source is reduced to zero while keeping the magnetic moment constant. It is a magnetic analogue of the electric ...
which generates a
magnetic field
A magnetic field is a vector field that describes the magnetic influence on moving electric charges, electric currents, and magnetic materials. A moving charge in a magnetic field experiences a force perpendicular to its own velocity and t ...
. In older
hard disk drive
A hard disk drive (HDD), hard disk, hard drive, or fixed disk is an electro-mechanical data storage device that stores and retrieves digital data using magnetic storage with one or more rigid rapidly rotating platters coated with magn ...
(HDD) designs the regions were oriented horizontally and parallel to the disk surface, but beginning about 2005, the orientation was changed to
perpendicular
In elementary geometry, two geometric objects are perpendicular if they intersect at a right angle (90 degrees or π/2 radians). The condition of perpendicularity may be represented graphically using the ''perpendicular symbol'', ⟂. It can ...
to allow for closer magnetic domain spacing.
Older hard disk drives used
iron(III) oxide
Iron(III) oxide or ferric oxide is the inorganic compound with the formula Fe2O3. It is one of the three main oxides of iron, the other two being iron(II) oxide (FeO), which is rare; and iron(II,III) oxide (Fe3O4), which also occurs naturally ...
(Fe
2O
3) as the magnetic material, but current disks use a
cobalt
Cobalt is a chemical element with the symbol Co and atomic number 27. As with nickel, cobalt is found in the Earth's crust only in a chemically combined form, save for small deposits found in alloys of natural meteoric iron. The free element, ...
-based alloy.
For reliable storage of data, the recording material needs to resist self-demagnetisation, which occurs when the magnetic domains repel each other. Magnetic domains written too close together in a weakly magnetisable material will degrade over time due to rotation of the
magnetic moment
In electromagnetism, the magnetic moment is the magnetic strength and orientation of a magnet or other object that produces a magnetic field. Examples of objects that have magnetic moments include loops of electric current (such as electromagnets ...
of one or more domains to cancel out these forces. The domains rotate sideways to a halfway position that weakens the readability of the domain and relieves the magnetic stresses.
A write head magnetises a region by generating a strong local magnetic field, and a read head detects the magnetisation of the regions. Early HDDs used an
electromagnet
An electromagnet is a type of magnet in which the magnetic field is produced by an electric current. Electromagnets usually consist of wire wound into a coil. A current through the wire creates a magnetic field which is concentrated in the ...
both to magnetise the region and to then read its magnetic field by using
electromagnetic induction
Electromagnetic or magnetic induction is the production of an electromotive force (emf) across an electrical conductor in a changing magnetic field.
Michael Faraday is generally credited with the discovery of induction in 1831, and James Cle ...
. Later versions of inductive heads included Metal In Gap (MIG) heads and
thin film
A thin film is a layer of material ranging from fractions of a nanometer ( monolayer) to several micrometers in thickness. The controlled synthesis of materials as thin films (a process referred to as deposition) is a fundamental step in many a ...
heads. As data density increased, read heads using
magnetoresistance
Magnetoresistance is the tendency of a material (often ferromagnetic) to change the value of its electrical resistance in an externally-applied magnetic field. There are a variety of effects that can be called magnetoresistance. Some occur in bul ...
(MR) came into use; the electrical resistance of the head changed according to the strength of the magnetism from the platter. Later development made use of
spintronics
Spintronics (a portmanteau meaning spin transport electronics), also known as spin electronics, is the study of the intrinsic spin of the electron and its associated magnetic moment, in addition to its fundamental electronic charge, in solid-sta ...
; in read heads, the magnetoresistive effect was much greater than in earlier types, and was dubbed
"giant" magnetoresistance (GMR). In today's heads, the read and write elements are separate, but in close proximity, on the head portion of an actuator arm. The read element is typically
magneto-resistive while the write element is typically thin-film inductive.
The heads are kept from contacting the platter surface by the air that is extremely close to the platter; that air moves at or near the platter speed. The record and playback head are mounted on a block called a slider, and the surface next to the platter is shaped to keep it just barely out of contact. This forms a type of
air bearing.
Magnetic recording classes
Analog recording
Analog recording
Analog recording is a technique used for the recording of analog signals which, among many possibilities, allows analog audio for later playback.
Analog audio recording began with mechanical systems such as the phonautograph and phonograph. ...
is based on the fact that remnant magnetisation of a given material depends on the magnitude of the applied field. The magnetic material is normally in the form of tape, with the tape in its blank form being initially demagnetised. When recording, the tape runs at a constant speed. The writing head magnetises the tape with current proportional to the signal. A magnetisation distribution is achieved along the magnetic tape. Finally, the distribution of the magnetisation can be read out, reproducing the original signal. The magnetic tape is typically made by embedding magnetic particles (approximately 0.5 micrometers
in size) in a plastic binder on polyester film tape. The most commonly-used of these was ferric oxide, though chromium dioxide, cobalt, and later pure metal particles were also used. Analog recording was the most popular method of audio and video recording. Since the late 1990s, however, tape recording has declined in popularity due to digital recording.
Digital recording
Instead of creating a magnetisation distribution in analog recording,
digital recording
In digital recording, an audio or video signal is converted into a stream of discrete numbers representing the changes over time in air pressure for audio, or chroma and luminance values for video. This number stream is saved to a storage ...
only needs two stable magnetic states, which are the +Ms and -Ms on the
hysteresis loop
Hysteresis is the dependence of the state of a system on its history. For example, a magnet may have more than one possible magnetic moment in a given magnetic field, depending on how the field changed in the past. Plots of a single component of ...
. Examples of digital recording are
floppy disk
A floppy disk or floppy diskette (casually referred to as a floppy, or a diskette) is an obsolescent type of disk storage composed of a thin and flexible disk of a magnetic storage medium in a square or nearly square plastic enclosure lined ...
s and
hard disk drive
A hard disk drive (HDD), hard disk, hard drive, or fixed disk is an electro-mechanical data storage device that stores and retrieves digital data using magnetic storage with one or more rigid rapidly rotating platters coated with magn ...
s (HDDs). Digital recording has also been carried out on tapes. However, HDDs offer superior capacities at reasonable prices; at the time of writing (2020), consumer-grade HDDs offer data storage at about $0.03 per GB.
Recording media in HDDs use a stack of thin films to store information and a read/write head to read and write information to and from the media; various developments have been carried out in the area of used materials.
Magneto-optical recording
Magneto-optical recording writes/reads optically. When writing, the magnetic medium is heated locally by a
laser
A laser is a device that emits light through a process of optical amplification based on the stimulated emission of electromagnetic radiation. The word "laser" is an acronym for "light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation". The firs ...
, which induces a rapid decrease of coercive field. Then, a small magnetic field can be used to switch the magnetisation. The reading process is based on magneto-optical
Kerr effect
The Kerr effect, also called the quadratic electro-optic (QEO) effect, is a change in the refractive index of a material in response to an applied electric field. The Kerr effect is distinct from the Pockels effect in that the induced index cha ...
. The magnetic medium are typically amorphous R-Fe-Co thin film (R being a rare earth element). Magneto-optical recording is not very popular. One famous example is
Minidisc developed by
Sony
, commonly stylized as SONY, is a Japanese multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Minato, Tokyo, Japan. As a major technology company, it operates as one of the world's largest manufacturers of consumer and professional ...
.
Domain propagation memory
Domain propagation memory is also called
bubble memory
Bubble memory is a type of non-volatile computer memory that uses a thin film of a magnetic material to hold small magnetized areas, known as ''bubbles'' or ''domains'', each storing one bit of data. The material is arranged to form a series o ...
. The basic idea is to control domain wall motion in a magnetic medium that is free of microstructure. Bubble refers to a stable cylindrical domain. Data is then recorded by the presence/absence of a bubble domain. Domain propagation memory has high insensitivity to shock and vibration, so its application is usually in space and aeronautics.
Technical details
Access method
Magnetic storage media can be classified as either
sequential access memory
In computing, sequential access memory (SAM) is a class of data storage devices that read stored data in a sequence. This is in contrast to random access memory (RAM) where data can be accessed in any order. Sequential access devices are usually a ...
or
random access memory
Random-access memory (RAM; ) is a form of computer memory that can be read and changed in any order, typically used to store working data and machine code. A random-access memory device allows data items to be read or written in almost the s ...
, although in some cases the distinction is not perfectly clear. The access time can be defined as the average time needed to gain access to stored records. In the case of magnetic wire, the read/write head only covers a very small part of the recording surface at any given time. Accessing different parts of the wire involves winding the wire forward or backward until the point of interest is found. The time to access this point depends on how far away it is from the starting point. The case of ferrite-core memory is the opposite. Every core location is immediately accessible at any given time.
Hard disks and modern linear serpentine tape drives do not precisely fit into either category. Both have many parallel tracks across the width of the media and the read/write heads take time to switch between tracks and to scan within tracks. Different spots on the storage media take different amounts of time to access. For a hard disk this time is typically less than 10 ms, but tapes might take as much as 100 s.
Coding schemes
Magnetic disk heads and magnetic tape heads cannot pass DC (direct current), so the coding schemes for both tape and disk data are designed to minimize the
DC offset. Most magnetic storage devices use
error correction
In information theory and coding theory with applications in computer science and telecommunication, error detection and correction (EDAC) or error control are techniques that enable reliable delivery of digital data over unreliable communic ...
.
Many magnetic disks internally use some form of
run-length limited coding and
partial-response maximum-likelihood.
Current usage
, common uses of magnetic storage media are for computer data mass storage on hard disks and the recording of analog audio and video works on
analog tape
Magnetic tape is a medium for magnetic storage made of a thin, magnetizable coating on a long, narrow strip of plastic film. It was developed in Germany in 1928, based on the earlier magnetic wire recording from Denmark. Devices that use mag ...
. Since much of audio and video production is moving to digital systems, the usage of hard disks is expected to increase at the expense of analog tape.
Digital tape and
tape libraries are popular for the high capacity data storage of archives and backups.
Floppy disk
A floppy disk or floppy diskette (casually referred to as a floppy, or a diskette) is an obsolescent type of disk storage composed of a thin and flexible disk of a magnetic storage medium in a square or nearly square plastic enclosure lined ...
s see some marginal usage, particularly in dealing with older computer systems and software. Magnetic storage is also widely used in some specific applications, such as bank
cheques (
MICR
Magnetic ink character recognition code, known in short as MICR code, is a character recognition technology used mainly by the banking industry to streamline the processing and clearance of cheques and other documents. MICR encoding, called the ' ...
) and credit/debit cards (
mag stripes).
Future
A new type of magnetic storage, called
magnetoresistive random-access memory or MRAM, is being produced that stores
data
In the pursuit of knowledge, data (; ) is a collection of discrete values that convey information, describing quantity, quality, fact, statistics, other basic units of meaning, or simply sequences of symbols that may be further interpret ...
in magnetic bits based on the
tunnel magnetoresistance
Tunnel magnetoresistance (TMR) is a magnetoresistive effect that occurs in a magnetic tunnel junction (MTJ), which is a component consisting of two ferromagnets separated by a thin insulator. If the insulating layer is thin enough (typically a fe ...
(TMR) effect. Its advantage is non-volatility, low power usage, and good shock robustness. The 1st generation that was developed was produced by
Everspin Technologies, and utilized field induced writing.
The 2nd generation is being developed through two approaches:
thermal-assisted switching
Crocus Technology, founded in 2006, is a venture-capital-backed semiconductor startup company developing magnetoresistive random-access memory (MRAM) technology. The company's products originated in a Grenoble-based Spintec laboratory and its te ...
(TAS)
which is currently being developed by
Crocus Technology, and
spin-transfer torque (STT) on which
Crocus
''Crocus'' (; plural: crocuses or croci) is a genus of seasonal flowering plants in the family Iridaceae (iris family) comprising about 100 species of perennials growing from corms. They are low growing plants, whose flower stems remain underg ...
,
Hynix
SK hynix Inc. is a South Korean supplier of dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) chips and flash memory chips. Hynix is the world's second-largest memory chipmaker (after Samsung Electronics) and the world's third-largest semiconductor company. ...
,
IBM, and several other companies are working.
However, with storage density and capacity orders of magnitude smaller than an
HDD, MRAM is useful in applications where moderate amounts of storage with a need for very frequent updates are required, which
flash memory
Flash memory is an electronic non-volatile computer memory storage medium that can be electrically erased and reprogrammed. The two main types of flash memory, NOR flash and NAND flash, are named for the NOR and NAND logic gates. Both u ...
cannot support due to its limited write endurance. Six state MRAM is also being developed, echoing four bit multi level flash memory cells, that have six different bits, as opposed to
two.
Research is also being done by Aleksei Kimel at
Radboud University in the Netherlands towards the possibility of using
terahertz radiation
Terahertz radiation – also known as submillimeter radiation, terahertz waves, tremendously high frequency
(THF), T-rays, T-waves, T-light, T-lux or THz – consists of electromagnetic waves within the ITU-designated band of fre ...
rather than using standard electropulses for writing data on magnetic storage media. By using terahertz radiation, writing time can be reduced considerably (50x faster than when using standard electropulses). Another advantage is that terahertz radiation generates almost no heat, thus reducing cooling requirements.
[Kijk magazine, 12, 2019]
See also
*
Digital Audio Tape
*
Digital Data Storage
*
Disk storage
Disk storage (also sometimes called drive storage) is a general category of storage mechanisms where data is recorded by various electronic, magnetic, optical, or mechanical changes to a surface layer of one or more rotating disks. A disk drive is ...
*
Karlqvist gap The Karlqvist gap or Karlqvist Field is an electromagnetic phenomenon discovered in 1953 by the Swedish engineer Olle Karlqvist (1922-1976), which is important in magnetic storage for computers. (HTML 1 kB)
Karlqvist discovered the phenomenon whi ...
*
Magnetoresistive random-access memory (MRAM)
* Magnetic recording methods:
**
Heat-assisted magnetic recording
Heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) (pronounced "''hammer")'' is a magnetic storage technology for greatly increasing the amount of data that can be stored on a magnetic device such as a hard disk drive by temporarily heating the disk materia ...
(HAMR)
**
Longitudinal magnetic recording (LMR)
**
Perpendicular magnetic recording
Perpendicular recording (or perpendicular magnetic recording, PMR), also known as conventional magnetic recording (CMR), is a technology for data recording on magnetic media, particularly hard disks. It was first proven advantageous in 1976 by ...
(PMR), also known as conventional magnetic recording (CMR)
**
Shingled magnetic recording
Shingled magnetic recording (SMR) is a magnetic storage data recording technology used in hard disk drives (HDDs) to increase storage density and overall per-drive storage capacity. Conventional hard disk drives record data by writing non-overl ...
(SMR)
*
Marvin Camras (1916–1995), American electrical engineer and inventor, major contributor to magnetic recording technology
Reference
External links
*
History of Magnetic Recording(BBC/H2G2)
''Selected History of Magnetic Recording''''Oberlin Smith and the Invention of Magnetic Sound Recording''on the UC San Diego web site (CMRR).
*
of Magnetic Recording.
" Science Reporter, VOLUME 43 NUMBER 7 JULY 2006 "Magnetic Recording a Revolutionary Technology"
*
{{Authority control
American inventions
Storage media
Computer storage media
Magnetic devices