Thinking small
The miniaturization of electronic gadgets has been so relentless that we are no longer astounded by tales of portable supercomputers, credit-card-sized cameras and wafer-thin cellphones made of paper and metallic ink. But the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences reminded us this week of the technical leaps behind the seemingly steady progress. The academy awarded this year’s Nobel Prize in physics to a pair of European scientists whose research fueled the exponential increase in hard-drive storage capacity -- a change that has liberated consumers and shaken the entertainment industry.
The winners, Peter Gruenberg of Julich, Germany, and Albert Fert of Orsay, France, each discovered in 1988 that they could magnify the effects of a magnetic field by using ultra-thin layers of metal. This principle, called giant magnetoresistance, eventually enabled manufacturers of hard drives to use much weaker fields to read and write data, a key step in packing more information into smaller spaces.
The state-of-the-art hard drive back then was small enough to fit in a laptop but held only 20 megabytes of data -- barely enough for a minute of CD-quality music. It wasn’t until Gruenberg’s and Fert’s principles were translated into products about a decade later that capacities started to skyrocket. Soon, manufacturers were cramming nearly 1 gigabyte of data onto every square inch of a hard-drive platter, making possible palm-sized devices that could store an entire music collection. Hello, iPod; goodbye, CD! Similarly, the explosion in capacity and plummeting prices opened the door for TiVo and other digital video recorders, which have made it simple for viewers to amass large libraries of free TV, create their own program lineups and skip commercials.
The work of Gruenberg and Fert has been augmented by new advances in storage technology, so it’s a safe bet that more transformative devices are on the way. Within a few years, manufacturers expect drive capacity to reach 12 terabytes -- enough to hold 1,000 high-definition movies and 1,000 CDs. That expansion presents an opportunity for the entertainment industry to develop products and services that take advantage of those capabilities. Or it can follow the lead of the major record labels, which were blindsided by the iPod and are still struggling to adapt.
