CompactFlash ( CF ) is a flash memory mass storage device used mainly in portable electronic devices. The format was specified and the devices were first manufactured by SanDisk in 1994.
89-520: CompactFlash became one of the most successful of the early memory card formats, surpassing Miniature Card and SmartMedia . Subsequent formats, such as MMC / SD , various Memory Stick formats, and xD-Picture Card offered stiff competition. Most of these cards are smaller than CompactFlash while offering comparable capacity and speed. Proprietary memory card formats for use in professional audio and video, such as P2 and SxS , are faster, but physically larger and more costly. CompactFlash's popularity
178-684: A spindle that holds flat circular disks, called platters , which hold the recorded data. The platters are made from a non-magnetic material, usually aluminum alloy , glass , or ceramic . They are coated with a shallow layer of magnetic material typically 10–20 nm in depth, with an outer layer of carbon for protection. For reference, a standard piece of copy paper is 0.07–0.18 mm (70,000–180,000 nm) thick. The platters in contemporary HDDs are spun at speeds varying from 4200 rpm in energy-efficient portable devices, to 15,000 rpm for high-performance servers. The first HDDs spun at 1,200 rpm and, for many years, 3,600 rpm
267-454: A RAID configuration. CF cards may perform the function of the master or slave drive on the IDE bus, but have issues sharing the bus. Moreover, late-model cards that provide DMA (using UDMA or MWDMA) may present problems when used through a passive adapter that does not support DMA. Original PC Card memory cards used an internal battery to maintain data when power was removed. The rated life of
356-522: A stepper motor . Early hard disk drives wrote data at some constant bits per second, resulting in all tracks having the same amount of data per track, but modern drives (since the 1990s) use zone bit recording , increasing the write speed from inner to outer zone and thereby storing more data per track in the outer zones. In modern drives, the small size of the magnetic regions creates the danger that their magnetic state might be lost because of thermal effects — thermally induced magnetic instability which
445-416: A "stopgap" technology between PMR and Seagate's intended successor heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR). SMR utilises overlapping tracks for increased data density, at the cost of design complexity and lower data access speeds (particularly write speeds and random access 4k speeds). By contrast, HGST (now part of Western Digital ) focused on developing ways to seal helium -filled drives instead of
534-553: A 5 GB "1-inch hard drive" in June, 2004, and an 8 GB version in June, 2005. In early 2008, the CFA demonstrated CompactFlash cards with a built in SATA interface. Several companies make adapters that allow CF cards to be connected to PCI , PCMCIA , IDE and SATA connections, allowing a CF card to act as a solid-state drive with virtually any operating system or BIOS, and even in
623-455: A CF card slot with an adapter. Formats that can be used this way include SD / MMC , Memory Stick Duo, xD-Picture Card in a Type I slot and SmartMedia in a Type II slot, as of 2005. Some multi-card readers use CF for I/O as well. The first CompactFlash cards had capacities of 2 to 10 megabytes. This increased to 64 MB in 1996, 128 MB in 1998, 256 MB in 1999, 512 MB in 2001, and 1 GB in 2002. The CompactFlash interface
712-519: A FAT32 format. The way many digital cameras update the file system as they write to the card creates a FAT32 bottleneck. Writing to a FAT32-formatted card generally takes a little longer than writing to a FAT16-formatted card with similar performance capabilities. For instance, the Canon EOS 10D writes the same photo to a FAT16-formatted 2 GB CompactFlash card somewhat faster than to a same speed 4 GB FAT32-formatted CompactFlash card, although
801-582: A Field Generation Layer (FGL) and a Spin Injection Layer (SIL), and the FGL produces a magnetic field using spin-polarised electrons originating in the SIL, which is a form of spin torque energy. A typical HDD has two electric motors: a spindle motor that spins the disks and an actuator (motor) that positions the read/write head assembly across the spinning disks. The disk motor has an external rotor attached to
890-418: A bit cell comprising about 18 magnetic grains (11 by 1.6 grains). Since the mid-2000s, areal density progress has been challenged by a superparamagnetic trilemma involving grain size, grain magnetic strength and ability of the head to write. In order to maintain acceptable signal-to-noise, smaller grains are required; smaller grains may self-reverse ( electrothermal instability ) unless their magnetic strength
979-522: A block erase of the area to be written to, ECC calculation, write itself (an individual memory cell read takes around 100 ns, a write to the chip takes 1ms+ or 10,000 times longer). Because the USB 2.0 interface is limited to 35 MB/s and lacks bus mastering hardware, USB 2.0 implementation results in slower access. Modern UDMA-7 CompactFlash Cards provide data rates up to 145 MB/s and require USB 3.0 data transfer rates. A direct motherboard connection
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#17327877259601068-499: A block is written. This process is called wear leveling . When using CompactFlash in ATA mode to take the place of the hard disk drive , wear leveling becomes critical because low-numbered blocks contain tables whose contents change frequently. Current CompactFlash cards spread the wear-leveling across the entire drive. The more advanced CompactFlash cards will move data that rarely changes to ensure all blocks wear evenly. NAND flash memory
1157-489: A breather port, unlike their air-filled counterparts. Other recording technologies are either under research or have been commercially implemented to increase areal density, including Seagate's heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR). HAMR requires a different architecture with redesigned media and read/write heads, new lasers, and new near-field optical transducers. HAMR is expected to ship commercially in late 2024, after technical issues delayed its introduction by more than
1246-449: A component of the IBM 305 RAMAC system. It was approximately the size of two large refrigerators and stored five million six-bit characters (3.75 megabytes ) on a stack of 52 disks (100 surfaces used). The 350 had a single arm with two read/write heads, one facing up and the other down, that moved both horizontally between a pair of adjacent platters and vertically from one pair of platters to
1335-1087: A decade, from earlier projections as early as 2009. HAMR's planned successor, bit-patterned recording (BPR), has been removed from the roadmaps of Western Digital and Seagate. Western Digital's microwave-assisted magnetic recording (MAMR), also referred to as energy-assisted magnetic recording (EAMR), was sampled in 2020, with the first EAMR drive, the Ultrastar HC550, shipping in late 2020. Two-dimensional magnetic recording (TDMR) and "current perpendicular to plane" giant magnetoresistance (CPP/GMR) heads have appeared in research papers. Some drives have adopted dual independent actuator arms to increase read/write speeds and compete with SSDs. A 3D-actuated vacuum drive (3DHD) concept and 3D magnetic recording have been proposed. Depending upon assumptions on feasibility and timing of these technologies, Seagate forecasts that areal density will grow 20% per year during 2020–2034. The highest-capacity HDDs shipping commercially in 2024 are 32 TB. The capacity of
1424-451: A few revolutions but current drawn can reach up to 350 milliamps and runs at 40-50 mA mean current. Its average seek time is 8 ms and can sustain 9 MB/s read and write, and has an interface speed of 33 MB/s. Hitachi's 4 GB Microdrive is 12 ms seek, sustained 6 MB/s. The CF 5.0 Specification supports capacities up to 128 PiB using 48-bit logical block addressing (LBA). Prior to 2006, CF drives using magnetic media offered
1513-576: A growing number of cameras, video recorders, and audio recorders that use the faster data rates offered by CFast media. As of 2017, in the wider embedded electronics industry, transition from CF to CFast is still relatively slow, probably due to hardware cost considerations and some inertia (familiarity with CF) and because a significant part of the industry is satisfied with the lower performance provided by CF cards, thus having no reason to change. A strong incentive to change to CFast for embedded electronics companies using designs based on Intel PC architecture
1602-503: A niche in the professional camera market especially well. It has benefited from both a better cost to memory-size ratio and, for much of the format's life, generally greater available capacity than other formats. CF cards can be used directly in a PC Card slot with a plug adapter, used as an ATA (IDE) or PCMCIA storage device with a passive adapter or with a reader, or attached to other types of ports such as USB or FireWire . As some newer card types are smaller, they can be used directly in
1691-549: A range of −45 °C to +85 °C. NOR -based flash has lower density than newer NAND -based systems, and CompactFlash is therefore the physically largest of the three memory card formats introduced in the early 1990s, being derived from the JEIDA/PCMCIA Memory Card formats. The other two are Miniature Card (MiniCard) and SmartMedia (SSFDC). However, CF did switch to NAND type memory later. The IBM Microdrive format, later made by Hitachi , implements
1780-475: A removable disk module, which included both the disk pack and the head assembly, leaving the actuator motor in the drive upon removal. Later "Winchester" drives abandoned the removable media concept and returned to non-removable platters. In 1974, IBM introduced the swinging arm actuator, made feasible because the Winchester recording heads function well when skewed to the recorded tracks. The simple design of
1869-538: A second set. Variants of the IBM 350 were the IBM 355 , IBM 7300 and IBM 1405 . In 1961, IBM announced, and in 1962 shipped, the IBM ;1301 disk storage unit, which superseded the IBM 350 and similar drives. The 1301 consisted of one (for Model 1) or two (for model 2) modules, each containing 25 platters, each platter about 1 ⁄ 8 -inch (3.2 mm) thick and 24 inches (610 mm) in diameter. While
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#17327877259601958-616: A swing arm drive, the IBM 0680 (Piccolo), with eight inch platters, exploring the possibility that smaller platters might offer advantages. Other eight inch drives followed, then 5 + 1 ⁄ 4 in (130 mm) drives, sized to replace the contemporary floppy disk drives . The latter were primarily intended for the then fledgling personal computer (PC) market. Over time, as recording densities were greatly increased, further reductions in disk diameter to 3.5" and 2.5" were found to be optimum. Powerful rare earth magnet materials became affordable during this period, and were complementary to
2047-423: A thin film of ferromagnetic material on both sides of a disk. Sequential changes in the direction of magnetization represent binary data bits . The data is read from the disk by detecting the transitions in magnetization. User data is encoded using an encoding scheme, such as run-length limited encoding, which determines how the data is represented by the magnetic transitions. A typical HDD design consists of
2136-499: A tiny fraction of the detected errors end up as not correctable. Examples of specified uncorrected bit read error rates include: Within a given manufacturers model the uncorrected bit error rate is typically the same regardless of capacity of the drive. The worst type of errors are silent data corruptions which are errors undetected by the disk firmware or the host operating system; some of these errors may be caused by hard disk drive malfunctions while others originate elsewhere in
2225-730: A type of non-volatile storage , retaining stored data when powered off. Modern HDDs are typically in the form of a small rectangular box . Hard disk drives were introduced by IBM in 1956, and were the dominant secondary storage device for general-purpose computers beginning in the early 1960s. HDDs maintained this position into the modern era of servers and personal computers , though personal computing devices produced in large volume, like mobile phones and tablets , rely on flash memory storage devices. More than 224 companies have produced HDDs historically , though after extensive industry consolidation, most units are manufactured by Seagate , Toshiba , and Western Digital . HDDs dominate
2314-467: Is 37 × 45 × 3.5 mm thick and can have devices on both sides of the substrate. Its 60-pin connector was a memory-only subset of PCMCIA and featured 16-bit data and 24-bit address bus with 3.3 or 5-volt signaling. Miniature Cards support Attribute Information Structure (AIS) in the I²C identification EEPROM . The Miniature Card format competed with SmartMedia and CompactFlash cards, also released during
2403-527: Is a 50-pin subset of the 68-pin PCMCIA connector. "It can be easily slipped into a passive 68-pin PCMCIA Type II to CF Type I adapter that fully meets PCMCIA electrical and mechanical interface specifications", according to compactflash.org. The interface operates, depending on the state of a mode pin on power-up, as either a 16-bit PC Card (0x7FF address limit) or as an IDE (PATA) interface. Unlike
2492-575: Is aimed at high-definition camcorders and high-resolution digital cameras, but the new cards are not backward compatible with either CompactFlash or CFast. The XQD card format was officially announced by the CompactFlash Association in December 2011. There are two main subdivisions of CF cards, 3.3 mm-thick type I and 5 mm-thick type II (CF2). The type II slot is used by miniature hard drives and some other devices, such as
2581-476: 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 magnetic material. The platters are paired with magnetic heads , usually arranged on a moving actuator arm, which read and write data to the platter surfaces. Data is accessed in a random-access manner, meaning that individual blocks of data can be stored and retrieved in any order. HDDs are
2670-613: Is based on the Serial ATA (SATA) interface, rather than the Parallel ATA /IDE (PATA) bus for which all previous versions of CompactFlash are designed. CFast is also known as CompactFast. CFast 1.0/1.1 supports a higher maximum transfer rate than current CompactFlash cards, using SATA 2.0 (300 MB/s) interface, while PATA is limited to 167 MB/s using UDMA 7 . CFast cards are not physically or electrically compatible with CompactFlash cards. However, since SATA can emulate
2759-471: Is based on the Serial ATA interface. In November 2010, SanDisk, Sony and Nikon presented a next generation card format to the CompactFlash Association. The new format has a similar form factor to CF/CFast but is based on the PCI Express interface instead of Parallel ATA or Serial ATA. With potential read and write speeds of 1 Gbit/s (125 MB/s ) and storage capabilities beyond 2 TiB , the new format
CompactFlash - Misplaced Pages Continue
2848-446: Is capable of scheduling reads and writes efficiently on the platter surfaces and remapping sectors of the media that have failed. Modern drives make extensive use of error correction codes (ECCs), particularly Reed–Solomon error correction . These techniques store extra bits, determined by mathematical formulas, for each block of data; the extra bits allow many errors to be corrected invisibly. The extra bits themselves take up space on
2937-590: Is commonly known as the " superparamagnetic limit ". To counter this, the platters are coated with two parallel magnetic layers, separated by a three-atom layer of the non-magnetic element ruthenium , and the two layers are magnetized in opposite orientation, thus reinforcing each other. Another technology used to overcome thermal effects to allow greater recording densities is perpendicular recording (PMR), first shipped in 2005, and as of 2007 , used in certain HDDs. Perpendicular recording may be accompanied by changes in
3026-460: Is declining as CFexpress is taking over. As of 2022, both Canon and Nikon's newest high end cameras, e.g. the Canon EOS R5 , Canon EOS R3 , and Nikon Z 9 use CFexpress cards for the higher performance required to record 8K video. Traditional CompactFlash cards use the Parallel ATA interface, but in 2008, a variant of CompactFlash, CFast was announced. CFast (also known as CompactFast)
3115-669: Is improving faster than HDDs. NAND has a higher price elasticity of demand than HDDs, and this drives market growth. During the late 2000s and 2010s, the product life cycle of HDDs entered a mature phase, and slowing sales may indicate the onset of the declining phase. The 2011 Thailand floods damaged the manufacturing plants and impacted hard disk drive cost adversely between 2011 and 2013. In 2019, Western Digital closed its last Malaysian HDD factory due to decreasing demand, to focus on SSD production. All three remaining HDD manufacturers have had decreasing demand for their HDDs since 2014. A modern HDD records data by magnetizing
3204-418: Is increased, but known write head materials are unable to generate a strong enough magnetic field sufficient to write the medium in the increasingly smaller space taken by grains. Magnetic storage technologies are being developed to address this trilemma, and compete with flash memory –based solid-state drives (SSDs). In 2013, Seagate introduced shingled magnetic recording (SMR), intended as something of
3293-544: Is less reliable than magnetic media. Car PC Hacks suggests disabling the Windows swap file and using its Enhanced Write Filter (EWF) to eliminate unnecessary writes to flash memory. Additionally, when formatting a flash-memory drive, the Quick Format method should be used, to write as little as possible to the device. Most CompactFlash flash-memory devices limit wear on blocks by varying the physical location to which
3382-441: Is often limited to 33 MB/s because IDE to CF adapters lack high speed ATA (66 MB/s plus) cable support. Power on from sleep/off takes longer than power up from standby. Many 1-inch (25 mm) hard drives (often referred to by the trademarked name " Microdrive ") typically spin at 3600 RPM, so rotational latency is a consideration, as is spin-up from standby or idle. Seagate's 8 GB ST68022CF drive spins up fully within
3471-446: Is prone to frequent soft read errors. The CompactFlash card includes error checking and correction (ECC) that detects the error and re-reads the block. The process is transparent to the user, although it may slow data access. As a flash memory device is solid-state , it is less affected by shock than a spinning disk. The possibility for electrical damage from upside-down insertion is prevented by asymmetrical side slots, assuming that
3560-460: Is shaped rather like an arrowhead and is made of doubly coated copper magnet wire . The inner layer is insulation, and the outer is thermoplastic, which bonds the coil together after it is wound on a form, making it self-supporting. The portions of the coil along the two sides of the arrowhead (which point to the center of the actuator bearing) then interact with the magnetic field of the fixed magnet. Current flowing radially outward along one side of
3649-588: Is specified in unit prefixes corresponding to powers of 1000: a 1- terabyte (TB) drive has a capacity of 1,000 gigabytes , where 1 gigabyte = 1 000 megabytes = 1 000 000 kilobytes (1 million) = 1 000 000 000 bytes (1 billion). Typically, some of an HDD's capacity is unavailable to the user because it is used by the file system and the computer operating system , and possibly inbuilt redundancy for error correction and recovery. There can be confusion regarding storage capacity, since capacities are stated in decimal gigabytes (powers of 1000) by HDD manufacturers, whereas
CompactFlash - Misplaced Pages Continue
3738-626: Is the fact that Intel has removed native support for the (P)ATA interface a few design platforms ago and the older CPU/PCH generations now have end-of-life status. Miniature Card The Miniature Card or MiniCard is a flash or SRAM memory card standard first promoted by Intel in 1995. The card was backed by Advanced Micro Devices , Fujitsu and Sharp Electronics . They are no longer manufactured. The Miniature Card Implementers Forum (MCIF) promoted this standard for consumer electronics, such as PDAs and palmtops, digital audio recorders, digital cameras and early smartphones. The Miniature Card
3827-645: The Apple Macintosh . Many Macintosh computers made between 1986 and 1998 featured a SCSI port on the back, making external expansion simple. Older compact Macintosh computers did not have user-accessible hard drive bays (indeed, the Macintosh 128K , Macintosh 512K , and Macintosh Plus did not feature a hard drive bay at all), so on those models, external SCSI disks were the only reasonable option for expanding upon any internal storage. HDD improvements have been driven by increasing areal density , listed in
3916-572: The Shannon limit and thus provide the highest storage density available. Typical hard disk drives attempt to "remap" the data in a physical sector that is failing to a spare physical sector provided by the drive's "spare sector pool" (also called "reserve pool"), while relying on the ECC to recover stored data while the number of errors in a bad sector is still low enough. The S.M.A.R.T ( Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology ) feature counts
4005-729: The CF Type II interface, but is a hard disk drive (HDD) as opposed to solid-state memory. Seagate also made CF HDDs. CompactFlash IDE (ATA) emulation speed is usually specified in "x" ratings, e.g. 8x, 20x, 133x. This is the same system used for CD-ROMs and indicates the maximum transfer rate in the form of a multiplier based on the original audio CD data transfer rate, which is 150 kB/s. where R = transfer rate, K = speed rating. For example, 133x rating means transfer rate of: 133 × 150 kB/s = 19,950 kB/s ≈ 20 MB/s. These are manufacturer speed ratings. Actual transfer rate may be higher, or lower, than shown on
4094-526: The HDD, but allow higher recording densities to be employed without causing uncorrectable errors, resulting in much larger storage capacity. For example, a typical 1 TB hard disk with 512-byte sectors provides additional capacity of about 93 GB for the ECC data. In the newest drives, as of 2009 , low-density parity-check codes (LDPC) were supplanting Reed–Solomon; LDPC codes enable performance close to
4183-559: The Hasselblad CFV Digital Back for the Hasselblad series of medium format cameras. There are four main card speeds: original CF, CF High Speed (using CF+/CF2.0), faster CF 3.0 standard and the faster CF 4.0 standard adopted as of 2007. CompactFlash was originally built around Intel 's NOR -based flash memory, but has switched to NAND technology. CF is among the oldest and most successful formats, and has held
4272-481: The IBM GV (Gulliver) drive, invented at IBM's UK Hursley Labs, became IBM's most licensed electro-mechanical invention of all time, the actuator and filtration system being adopted in the 1980s eventually for all HDDs, and still universal nearly 40 years and 10 billion arms later. Like the first removable pack drive, the first "Winchester" drives used platters 14 inches (360 mm) in diameter. In 1978, IBM introduced
4361-546: The PATA command protocol, existing CompactFlash software drivers can be used, although writing new drivers to use AHCI instead of PATA emulation will almost always result in significant performance gains. CFast cards use a female 7-pin SATA data connector , and a female 17-pin power connector, so an adaptor is required to connect CFast cards in place of standard SATA hard drives which use male connectors. The first CFast cards reached
4450-844: The PC Card interface, no dedicated programming voltages (Vpp1 and Vpp2) are provided on the CompactFlash interface. CompactFlash IDE mode defines an interface that is smaller than, but electrically identical to, the ATA interface. The CF device contains an ATA controller and appears to the host device as if it were a hard disk . CF devices operate at 3.3 volts or 5 volts, and can be swapped from system to system. CompactFlash supports C-H-S and 28-bit logical block addressing (CF 5.0 introduced support for LBA-48). CF cards with flash memory are able to cope with extremely rapid changes in temperature. Industrial versions of flash memory cards can operate at
4539-443: The arrowhead and radially inward on the other produces the tangential force . If the magnetic field were uniform, each side would generate opposing forces that would cancel each other out. Therefore, the surface of the magnet is half north pole and half south pole, with the radial dividing line in the middle, causing the two sides of the coil to see opposite magnetic fields and produce forces that add instead of canceling. Currents along
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#17327877259604628-511: The battery was the only reliability issue. CompactFlash cards that use flash memory, like other flash-memory devices, are rated for a limited number of erase/write cycles for any "block." While NOR flash has higher endurance, ranging from 10,000 to 1,000,000, they have not been adapted for memory card usage. Most mass storage usage flash are NAND based. As of 2015 NAND flash were being scaled down to 16 nm. They are usually rated for 500 to 3,000 write/erase cycles per block before hard failure. This
4717-456: The card depending on several factors. The speed rating quoted is almost always the read speed, while write speed is often slower. For reads, the onboard controller first powers up the memory chips from standby. Reads are usually in parallel, error correction is done on the data, then transferred through the interface 16 bits at a time. Error checking is required due to soft read errors. Writes require powerup from standby, wear leveling calculation,
4806-450: The case of embedded servo, otherwise known as sector servo technology). The servo feedback optimizes the signal-to-noise ratio of the GMR sensors by adjusting the voice coil motor to rotate the arm. A more modern servo system also employs milli and/or micro actuators to more accurately position the read/write heads. The spinning of the disks uses fluid-bearing spindle motors. Modern disk firmware
4895-441: The connection between the drive and the host. The rate of areal density advancement was similar to Moore's law (doubling every two years) through 2010: 60% per year during 1988–1996, 100% during 1996–2003 and 30% during 2003–2010. Speaking in 1997, Gordon Moore called the increase "flabbergasting", while observing later that growth cannot continue forever. Price improvement decelerated to −12% per year during 2010–2017, as
4984-487: The devices be read by personal computers but also suits the limited processing ability of some consumer devices such as cameras . There are varying levels of compatibility among FAT32-compatible cameras, MP3 players, PDAs, and other devices. While any device that claims FAT32-capability should read and write to a FAT32-formatted card without problems, some devices are tripped up by cards larger than 2 GB that are completely unformatted, while others may take longer to apply
5073-449: The disks; the stator windings are fixed in place. Opposite the actuator at the end of the head support arm is the read-write head; thin printed-circuit cables connect the read-write heads to amplifier electronics mounted at the pivot of the actuator. The head support arm is very light, but also stiff; in modern drives, acceleration at the head reaches 550 g . The actuator is a permanent magnet and moving coil motor that swings
5162-467: The earlier IBM disk drives used only two read/write heads per arm, the 1301 used an array of 48 heads (comb), each array moving horizontally as a single unit, one head per surface used. Cylinder-mode read/write operations were supported, and the heads flew about 250 micro-inches (about 6 μm) above the platter surface. Motion of the head array depended upon a binary adder system of hydraulic actuators which assured repeatable positioning. The 1301 cabinet
5251-443: The gaming industry (used in slot machines), as a natural evolution from the by then well-established CF cards. Current gaming industry supporters of the format include both specialist gaming companies (e.g. Aristocrat Leisure ) and OEMs such as Innocore (now part of Advantech Co., Ltd. ). The CFast 2.0 specification was released in the second quarter of 2012, updating the electrical interface to SATA 3.0 (600 MB/s). As of 2014,
5340-443: The growth of areal density slowed. The rate of advancement for areal density slowed to 10% per year during 2010–2016, and there was difficulty in migrating from perpendicular recording to newer technologies. As bit cell size decreases, more data can be put onto a single drive platter. In 2013, a production desktop 3 TB HDD (with four platters) would have had an areal density of about 500 Gbit/in which would have amounted to
5429-416: The heads to the desired position. A metal plate supports a squat neodymium–iron–boron (NIB) high-flux magnet . Beneath this plate is the moving coil, often referred to as the voice coil by analogy to the coil in loudspeakers , which is attached to the actuator hub, and beneath that is a second NIB magnet, mounted on the bottom plate of the motor (some drives have only one magnet). The voice coil itself
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#17327877259605518-557: The highest capacities (up to 8 GiB ). Now there are solid-state cards with higher capacities (up to 512 GB). As of 2011, solid-state drives (SSDs) have supplanted both kinds of CF drive for large capacity requirements. SanDisk announced its 16 GB Extreme III card at the photokina trade fair, in September, 2006. That same month, Samsung announced 16, 32 and 64 GB CF cards. Two years later, in September, 2008, PRETEC announced 100 GB cards. Seagate announced
5607-501: The host device can read them. CompactFlash cards are often used instead of hard drives in embedded systems, dumb terminals and various small form-factor PCs that are built for low noise output or power consumption. CompactFlash cards are often more readily available and smaller than purpose-built solid-state drives and often have faster seek times than hard drives. When CompactFlash was first being standardized, even full-sized hard disks were rarely larger than 4 GB in size, and so
5696-580: The host device uses a suitable connector. Small cards consume around 5% of the power required by small disk drives and still have reasonable transfer rates of over 45 MB/s for the more expensive 'high-speed' cards. However, the manufacturer's warning on the flash memory used for ReadyBoost indicates a current draw in excess of 500 mA. CompactFlash cards for use in consumer devices are typically formatted as FAT12 (for media up to 16 MB), FAT16 (for media up to 2 GB, sometimes up to 4 GB) and FAT32 (for media larger than 2 GB). This lets
5785-427: The largest hard drive had a capacity of 15 TB, while the largest capacity SSD had a capacity of 100 TB. As of 2018 , HDDs were forecast to reach 100 TB capacities around 2025, but as of 2019 , the expected pace of improvement was pared back to 50 TB by 2026. Smaller form factors, 1.8-inches and below, were discontinued around 2010. The cost of solid-state storage (NAND), represented by Moore's law ,
5874-494: The limitations of the ATA standard were considered acceptable. However, CF cards manufactured after the original Revision 1.0 specification are available in capacities up to 512 GB. While the current revision 6.0 works in [P]ATA mode, future revisions are expected to implement SATA mode. CE-ATA is a serial MMC-compatible interface based on the MultiMediaCard standard. A variant of CompactFlash known as CFast
5963-444: The magnetization of the material passing immediately under it. In modern drives, there is one head for each magnetic platter surface on the spindle, mounted on a common arm. An actuator arm (or access arm) moves the heads on an arc (roughly radially) across the platters as they spin, allowing each head to access almost the entire surface of the platter as it spins. The arm is moved using a voice coil actuator or, in some older designs,
6052-422: The manufacturing of the read/write heads to increase the strength of the magnetic field created by the heads. In 2004, a higher-density recording media was introduced, consisting of coupled soft and hard magnetic layers. So-called exchange spring media magnetic storage technology, also known as exchange coupled composite media , allows good writability due to the write-assist nature of the soft layer. However,
6141-426: The market in late 2009. At CES 2009, Pretec showed a 32 GB CFast card and announced that they should reach the market within a few months. Delock began distributing CFast cards in 2010, offering several card readers with USB 3.0 and eSATAp (power over eSATA) ports to support CFast cards. Seeking higher performance and still keeping a compact storage format, some of the earliest adoptors of CFast cards were in
6230-409: The memory chips in both cards have the same write speed specification. Although FAT16 is more wasteful of disk space with its larger clusters, it works better with the write strategy that flash memory chips require. The cards themselves can be formatted with any type of file system such as Ext , JFS , NTFS , or by one of the dedicated flash file systems . It can be divided into partitions as long as
6319-594: The mid-1990s, and the earlier, larger Type I PC Cards . Ultimately, CompactFlash and SmartMedia cards were more successful in the consumer electronics market. Olympus Digital Voice Recorder D1000 and the digital camera HP Photosmart uses the Miniature Card. Also Philips Velo 500 PDAs and CISCO 800 and 1700 used Miniature Cards. This computer hardware article is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Hard disk A hard disk drive ( HDD ), hard disk , hard drive , or fixed disk
6408-420: The most commonly used operating systems report capacities in powers of 1024, which results in a smaller number than advertised. Performance is specified as the time required to move the heads to a track or cylinder (average access time), the time it takes for the desired sector to move under the head (average latency , which is a function of the physical rotational speed in revolutions per minute ), and finally,
6497-559: The norm in most computer installations and reached capacities of 300 megabytes by the early 1980s. Non-removable HDDs were called "fixed disk" drives. In 1963, IBM introduced the 1302, with twice the track capacity and twice as many tracks per cylinder as the 1301. The 1302 had one (for Model 1) or two (for Model 2) modules, each containing a separate comb for the first 250 tracks and the last 250 tracks. Some high-performance HDDs were manufactured with one head per track, e.g. , Burroughs B-475 in 1964, IBM 2305 in 1970, so that no time
6586-731: The only product employing CFast 2.0 cards was the Arri Amira digital production camera, allowing frame rates of up to 200 fps; a CFast 2.0 adapter for the Arri Alexa/XT camera was also released. On 7 April 2014, Blackmagic Design announced the URSA cinema camera, which records to CFast media. On 8 April 2015, Canon Inc. announced the XC10 video camera, which also makes use of CFast cards. Blackmagic Design also announced that its URSA Mini will use CFast 2.0. As of October 2016, there are
6675-534: The platters, increasing areal density. Normally hard drive recording heads have a pole called a main pole that is used for writing to the platters, and adjacent to this pole is an air gap and a shield. The write coil of the head surrounds the pole. The STO device is placed in the air gap between the pole and the shield to increase the strength of the magnetic field created by the pole; FC-MAMR technically doesn't use microwaves, but uses technology employed in MAMR. The STO has
6764-416: The revenue of hard disk drives as of 2017 . Though SSDs have four to nine times higher cost per bit, they are replacing HDDs in applications where speed, power consumption, small size, high capacity and durability are important. As of 2019 , the cost per bit of SSDs is falling, and the price premium over HDDs has narrowed. The primary characteristics of an HDD are its capacity and performance . Capacity
6853-427: The speed at which the data is transmitted (data rate). The two most common form factors for modern HDDs are 3.5-inch, for desktop computers, and 2.5-inch, primarily for laptops. HDDs are connected to systems by standard interface cables such as SATA (Serial ATA), USB , SAS ( Serial Attached SCSI ), or PATA (Parallel ATA) cables. The first production IBM hard disk drive, the 350 disk storage , shipped in 1957 as
6942-438: The stack of disk platters when the drive was powered down. Instead, the heads were allowed to "land" on a special area of the disk surface upon spin-down, "taking off" again when the disk was later powered on. This greatly reduced the cost of the head actuator mechanism, but precluded removing just the disks from the drive as was done with the disk packs of the day. Instead, the first models of "Winchester technology" drives featured
7031-450: The swing arm actuator design to make possible the compact form factors of modern HDDs. As the 1980s began, HDDs were a rare and very expensive additional feature in PCs, but by the late 1980s, their cost had been reduced to the point where they were standard on all but the cheapest computers. Most HDDs in the early 1980s were sold to PC end users as an external, add-on subsystem. The subsystem
7120-439: The table above. Applications expanded through the 2000s, from the mainframe computers of the late 1950s to most mass storage applications including computers and consumer applications such as storage of entertainment content. In the 2000s and 2010s, NAND began supplanting HDDs in applications requiring portability or high performance. NAND performance is improving faster than HDDs, and applications for HDDs are eroding. In 2018,
7209-400: The thermal stability is determined only by the hardest layer and not influenced by the soft layer. Flux control MAMR (FC-MAMR) allows a hard drive to have increased recording capacity without the need for new hard disk drive platter materials. MAMR hard drives have a microwave generating spin torque generator (STO) on the read/write heads which allows physically smaller bits to be recorded to
7298-475: The top and bottom of the coil produce radial forces that do not rotate the head. The HDD's electronics controls the movement of the actuator and the rotation of the disk and transfers data to/from a disk controller . Feedback of the drive electronics is accomplished by means of special segments of the disk dedicated to servo feedback. These are either complete concentric circles (in the case of dedicated servo technology) or segments interspersed with real data (in
7387-491: The total number of errors in the entire HDD fixed by ECC (although not on all hard drives as the related S.M.A.R.T attributes "Hardware ECC Recovered" and "Soft ECC Correction" are not consistently supported), and the total number of performed sector remappings, as the occurrence of many such errors may predict an HDD failure . The "No-ID Format", developed by IBM in the mid-1990s, contains information about which sectors are bad and where remapped sectors have been located. Only
7476-433: The usual filtered air. Since turbulence and friction are reduced, higher areal densities can be achieved due to using a smaller track width, and the energy dissipated due to friction is lower as well, resulting in a lower power draw. Furthermore, more platters can be fit into the same enclosure space, although helium gas is notoriously difficult to prevent escaping. Thus, helium drives are completely sealed and do not have
7565-499: The volume of storage produced ( exabytes per year) for servers. Though production is growing slowly (by exabytes shipped ), sales revenues and unit shipments are declining, because solid-state drives (SSDs) have higher data-transfer rates, higher areal storage density, somewhat better reliability, and much lower latency and access times. The revenues for SSDs, most of which use NAND flash memory , slightly exceeded those for HDDs in 2018. Flash storage products had more than twice
7654-520: Was about the size of three large refrigerators placed side by side, storing the equivalent of about 21 million eight-bit bytes per module. Access time was about a quarter of a second. Also in 1962, IBM introduced the model 1311 disk drive, which was about the size of a washing machine and stored two million characters on a removable disk pack . Users could buy additional packs and interchange them as needed, much like reels of magnetic tape . Later models of removable pack drives, from IBM and others, became
7743-427: Was lost physically moving the heads to a track and the only latency was the time for the desired block of data to rotate into position under the head. Known as fixed-head or head-per-track disk drives, they were very expensive and are no longer in production. In 1973, IBM introduced a new type of HDD code-named " Winchester ". Its primary distinguishing feature was that the disk heads were not withdrawn completely from
7832-513: Was not sold under the drive manufacturer's name but under the subsystem manufacturer's name such as Corvus Systems and Tallgrass Technologies , or under the PC system manufacturer's name such as the Apple ProFile . The IBM PC/XT in 1983 included an internal 10 MB HDD, and soon thereafter, internal HDDs proliferated on personal computers. External HDDs remained popular for much longer on
7921-408: Was the norm. As of November 2019 , the platters in most consumer-grade HDDs spin at 5,400 or 7,200 rpm. Information is written to and read from a platter as it rotates past devices called read-and-write heads that are positioned to operate very close to the magnetic surface, with their flying height often in the range of tens of nanometers. The read-and-write head is used to detect and modify
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