EHDR is the Information Storage Industry Consortium’s collaborative research program in Extremely High Density Recording for advanced hard disk drive (HDD) technology. The EHDR Program was initiated in 1996, and, currently, its dual goals are to develop the underlying science and technology to allow the demonstration of stable hard disk magnetic recording at areal densities of 4 Terabits per square inch by early 2013 and 10 Terabits per square inch by the end of 2015.

The program is sponsored and funded by companies in the HDD industry, including the top four HDD manufacturers (Seagate Technology, Western Digital, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, and Samsung), and it supports research activities at major universities around the world. Participation is organized into five technical area working teams that consist of participants from industry, academia and government labs:

In addition, the research program’s overall goals and strategies are defined and refined by a Leadership Team of leading HDD technology experts.  The EHDR Program is currently open to new industry participants, with four sponsorship levels available.

The Case for Corporate Participation in the INSIC EHDR Research Program

The EHDR Research Program represents a highly efficient, highly leveraged means of gaining early, real-time access to the best university-based research worldwide and offers the industrial sponsors the opportunity to help direct this research, in a coordinated way, onto pre-competitive problems of common interest to the HDD industry.  It’s highly efficient, in the sense that only projects of very specific interest to the industry are supported, and these are supported in an extremely cost-effective manner.  It’s highly leveraged, in the sense that project support costs are divided among the industrial sponsors of the program, adding to its cost-effectiveness.

The Research Program is organized and directed by a Technical Leadership Team entirely from industry, and is overseen by the industrial sponsors through their representatives on the EHDR Board of Directors.  One of the strengths of the program is that it focuses the varied research projects toward achieving a common, integrated goal – currently, the EHDR Program is focusing on the challenges of achieving stable recording for HDDs at 4 Terabits per square inch, with research concentrating on the technologies of bit-patterned magnetic recording (BPMR) and heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR), and is also beginning to explore the feasibility of various approaches to achieving disk-based recording at an areal density of 10 Terabits per square inch.

EHDR supports only projects selected by the participating experts from industry, and which are approved by the EHDR Board as being critical to achieving the program’s overall goals.  In this effort, the industrial sponsors are not limited to research being conducted at a single university research center (or even a small handful of universities), and they can be highly selective in requesting proposals from the best individual university researchers available for each project, regardless of their academic affiliation.  In 2008-2009, the EHDR Program has supported research and/or travel by approximately 50 principal investigators (plus a large number of graduate students) at 18 research institutions located in the U.S., Asia and Europe. 

The EHDR Program also provides a unique mechanism for encouraging universities to work together on the larger problems involved with achieving extremely high areal density recording, and it serves to avoid duplication of research efforts by focusing researchers on complementary aspects of the problem.  In addition to the funded research, the EHDR Program provides an effective venue for the industrial sponsors to gain access to numerous relevant non-funded research contributions from university researchers, from the other industrial participants and from government laboratories (e.g., from the NIST Laboratories in both Boulder and Gaithersburg, as well as from the Data Storage Institute and the Institute of Materials Research & Engineering, both located in Singapore).  This is a testament to the EHDR Program’s unique pre-competitive forum in which leading industry, government and academic researchers can exchange and sharpen their ideas on what’s most important for the long-range success of our industry. 

The EHDR Program has three available sponsorship levels.  For HDD manufacturers or systems integrators, the annual research sponsorship fee is $200,000, while manufacturers of HDD components and subcomponents will contribute $100,000 per year to the pool of research funding.  Industry suppliers of equipment, materials and/or services may sponsor the program for an annual fee of $50,000.

Overall, sponsorship of the INSIC EHDR Research Program presents companies in the HDD industry with a unique opportunity to participate in a well-focused, exceptionally cost-efficient approach to maximizing the value of a portion of their investment in long-range university research, and to participate in the industry-wide dialogue on the future of our technology.

Membership in INSIC is a prerequisite for participation in any INSIC Research Program, including EHDR. 

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For more information on INSIC or the EHDR Research Program, please contact:

Sharon Rotter, INSIC Senior Program Manager: sharon@insic.org