Future trend of storage systems

The current status and development trends of data storage technology are surveyed. In current storage systems, magnetic disks play a major role in file memory. However, the capacity of LSI memory is rapidly increasing, and the LSI bit cost has been greatly reduced. The data transfer rate and access performance of recent optical disk systems have improved significantly. Synchrotron orbital radiation exposure technology, which seems to be the favorite in future LSI microprocessing technology, is discussed, and recently obtained results are presented. In magnetic-disk storage, the essential object is to reduce the spacing between the magnetic head and disk medium. The new technologies of microtribology and micromechanics are described. An essential theme for optical disk storage is access performance, which requires reduction of the size of the optical head. Integrated optical head technology is surveyed, and the importance of micromechatronics in the optical head is described