TeraStor launches NFR technology

Electronic News, March 3, 1997 by Andrew MacLellan

San Jose, Calif.--With $30 million in financing and a claimed 10x capacity advantage over existing storage devices, start-up TeraStor will hold its coming out party today, launching a new technology which the company said will result in a disk drive early next year with more than 20-gigabyte-per-surface storage capacity.

TeraStor co-founder, chairman and CEO James M. McCoy, who co-founded storage companies Maxtor and Quantum, said the promise of new Near Field Recording (NFR) technology is so rich it forced him from retirement with visions of creating a new performance strata in the rapidly consolidating storage industry. Established in December 1995, TeraStor's other principals include Gordon Knight and Bill Dobbin, who have assumed the positions of CTO and CFO, respectively.

"Having started two billion-dollar companies before, I'm quite confident that this will be my third," Mr. McCoy said assuredly. "We're taking an order of magnitude step--more than a five-year leap--bringing in capabilities that have not been seen before in the storage industry."

Designed as a replacement for fixed or removable hard disk drives (HDDs), magneto-optical, optical and tape storage technologies, NFR-based drives will be inexpensive enough for desktop use, will offer random access and HDD speeds and can be fashioned into any number of form factors, according to TeraStor. Early applications will include storage-intensive, high-end applications such as file servers.

TeraStor hopes to make its technology an industry standard by licensing the technology to all comers. The company will not itself make disk drives in volume although it will operate a pilot line to assist disk drive companies including potential licensees Quantum, Seagate, Maxtor and Western Digital in implementing the new technology.

Mr. McCoy said NFR is able to increase areal density while remaining cost-competitive by combining new methodologies with older drive technologies--using flying heights abandoned long ago by HDD storage developers, for example, to sidestep the thermal asperity and error correction issues which are mounting in the industry.

TeraStor obtained core NFR technology through a co-exclusive licensing arrangement with Quantum, which holds a minority stake in the company. And in addition to its own proprietary methods, TeraStor has acquired the exclusive rights to a new materials technology developed by Stanford University which it will use for the focusing lens in the flying head.

Like magneto-optical drives, TeraStor's NFR device will use a laser beam which it will focus through an objective lens to read data from a plastic substrate. However, NFR will also employ a secondary, Solid Immersion Lens (SIL) which narrows the spot size emerging from the SIL to even less than the wavelength of the laser beam itself, according to TeraStor. This is enabled by the high refractive index of the SIL's proprietary material which actually slows the speed of light and shortens the laser beam's wave peak to increase areal density to as much as 20GB on a single side of a 3.5-inch disk.

By bringing the disk, or medium, to within six micro-inches of the flying head--about three times the height of most HDD heads--the narrowly focused light beam and data are then linked through a technique known as evanescent coupling.

Unlike magneto-optical drives, TeraStor said NFR will eliminate the cost of a servo system by controlling the focus height of the flying head through use of an HDD-like air bearing. In addition, the company said it can exceed the theoretical limit of magnetic storage devices, which are bounded by the super para-magnetic limits of 40 and 70 gigabits-per-square-inch.