A*STAR DSI Promoting Thin Hybrid Drives as Better Alternative for Flash Memory for Tablets

With the dramatic growth of global tablet market, it has become imperative for the tablet makers to consider introducing further improvements in the areas of memory and storage. The Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR (News - Alert)) and Data Storage Institute (DSI) have come forward to offer an alternative to Flash memory, which is currently being used in the tablets as the only storage choice.

The Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR) is Singapore’s premier agency for fostering world-class scientific research and talent. A*STAR oversees 14 biomedical sciences and physical sciences and engineering research institutes, and six consortia & centers.

A*STAR supports Singapore's key economic clusters by providing intellectual, human and industrial capital to its partners in industry. It also supports extramural research in the universities, and with other local and international partners.

The Data Storage Institute (DSI) is a member of the A*STAR. The institute focuses on nurturing research talents and capabilities for world-class R&D in next generation storage technologies.

In a press release, A*STAR and DSI said that in the upcoming days, thin hybrid drives could provide a good alternative to Flash memory, which has quite a lot of limitations regarding scaling and performance.

Compared to Flash or solid state drives (SSD), hybrid drives can provide a larger storage capacity, and performances at a significantly lower cost. Compared to hard disk drives, hybrid drives can reduce power consumption by about 30 percent, according to the institutes. The lower power consumption eventually helps reduce costs and increase storage capacity.

Currently, the thinnest hard disk drive in the market for a 2.5 inch form factor is about 7 mm. A*STAR and DSI maintained that in order to earn a competitive edge in the fast growing media tablet market, the companies should consider offering a thickness of 5 mm or less for a hard disk drive.

The thickness of the current iPad2 is at 0.34 inch or 8.8 mm. DSI takes this thickness as a benchmark target for producing a thin hard disk drive that can easily fit into a tablet. The DSI seeks to mitigate the issues of portability, reliability of data, and power consumption through a hybrid architecture.

But the task of reducing the thickness of a hard disk drive is not easy and relates to the design of the spindle motor design. As opposed to current motor, which is based on a radial field design DSI claims to have designed an axial field motor that is 4 mm thick, and can spin at 5400/7200 revolutions per minute (rpm). The axial field design, according to DSI, eliminates cogging torque and unbalanced magnetic pull that in turn helps to reduce friction loss of the bearing, vibration and acoustic noise. DSI said that this novel and slim spindle motor will be demonstrated in DSI's thin drive with a 5 mm thickness.

“DSI is very excited about the direction that we are taking. We strongly believe there is an opening in the market for thin drives. We are capitalizing on our years of R&D experience in hard disk drive and data centre technologies and are working passionately to make the concept of thin hard disk drive into reality,” Dr. Pantelis Alexopoulos, executive director of DSI noted in a statement.

Earlier this month, Micron Technology (News - Alert), Inc., and Singapore's A*STAR Data Storage Institute (DSI) jointly announced that the two companies have entered into an agreement to collaborate on the development of spin transfer torque magnetic random access memory (STT-MRAM), a promising alternative non-volatile memory technology for next-generation storage.