IBM's Pixie Dust
  07/21/2001 5:37:35 AM MDT Albuquerque, Nm
  By Dustin D. Brand; Owner AMO

IBM calls it pixie dust, but it's really ruthenium.   IBM announced late last month it has developed a technique that could eventually quadruple the amount of stored data on hard disk drives.

IBM is using a multi-layer coating called AFC (anti-ferromagnetically coupled) media, vastly increasing the amount of data capable of being stored per square inch.

IBM's AFC technology uses a three atom thick layer of the element ruthenium (the pixie dust) sandwiched between two magnetic layers on the HDD. The resulting improvement in storage capacity is so dramatic, IBM officials have nicknamed the ruthenium "Pixie Dust".

IBM is already using the technology, and it is already in several IBM Hard Drives including the Travelstar notebook hard drive which offers data densities of as much as 25.7Gb per square inch of disk space.

IBM plans to implement AFC technology into all of it's disk drive products, and within 2 years yeild HDD's with as much as 200GB of disk space.

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