Avalanches of Wobbling Atoms Risk Hard Disk Data
 

*Source: DailyTech (http://www.dailytech.com/Avalanches+...icle8159.htm)*
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Avalanches are now more than just a common worry of mountaineers during winter, according to paper published by Joshua Deutsch, a theoretical physicist at the UC Santa Cruz, and Andreas Berger, a researcher at Hitachi Global Storage Technologies.

The paper, published in the July 13 edition of Physical Review Letters, discusses a phenomenon in spinning disk drives, termed “avalanches,” that may cause data loss. As noted by the article’s abstract, “In many magnetic materials, spin dynamics at short times are dominated by precessional motion as damping is relatively small. We describe how avalanches evolve under these conditions.”

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