Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording

Magnetic hard-disk drives (HDDs) are the working horses of data centers. The roughly 70 years of research and development that has gone into today’s – and tomorrow’s – HDDs is remarkable and multi-disciplinary, spanning physics, chemistry, materials sciences, electrical engineering (and more), and has led to some truly astonishing increases in storage density. In this talk, I will give an overview of this development and its results, and then spend some time on today’s and tomorrow’s technologies.

Stephanie obtained her Ph. D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Minnesota in 2010. Her graduate research involved modeling magnetic recording media and spin-torque based structures. After graduate school, she started working for Recording Head Operations at Seagate Technology in Bloomington, Minnesota as a read transducer designer. In 2015, she joined Seagate Research in Shakopee Minnesota, to model advanced Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording. Now, she is the Sr. Director of the Data Storage and Memory Devices group at Seagate Research. This team is responsible for conducting research on advanced hard drive and other storage and memory technologies through experimentation and physics-based simulation.