Clean room and laboratory in Switzerland
"The precision of a reading head can be compared with a Boeing 747 flying over earth surface less than 1 cm from the ground, with a speed of 272 km per second and able to count every single blade of grass."
Our swiss laboratory
Our laboratory is adjacent to our administrative offices. The access to this laboratory is secure with a swipe card locking system that allows only a few permitted persons to enter. It also offers a traceability for each entrance and exit.
Our laboratory is divided in different specific zones (soldering, disassembly, recovery, clean room, etc.).
Our laboratory is adjacent to our administrative offices. The access to this laboratory is secure with a swipe card locking system that allows only a few permitted persons to enter. It also offers a traceability for each entrance and exit.
Our swiss clean room
We have our own clean room in Neuchâtel (in a separate room of our laboratory) of 12m2 ISO 5 certified.
This clean room is under overpressure and inside, there's a laminar flow hood ISO 3 certified.
This in the laminar flow hood that we proceed to the manipulations that require a absolute cleanness, as, for example, changing the head stack or cleaning the platters.
Miniaturization and density of the HDDs
The detail of a platter surface is so small, that the informations density per cm2 is extremely high. Here are some examples of density on actual HDDs.
| WD 500Gb (2001) |
Seagate 1Tb (2010) |
Seagate 4Tb (2014) |
|
|---|---|---|---|
| Bits (0 or 1) per cm2 | 12 billions | 23 billions | 95 billions |
| Gigabytes per cm2 | 1.5 Go | 2.9 Go | 11 Go |
| DVD per cm2 | 0.37 DVD | 0.74 DVD | 3 DVD |
| Pictures per cm2 | 500 pictures | 1000 pictures | 4000 pictures |
| MP3 per cm2 | 370 MP3 | 750 MP3 | 3000 MP3 |
| Word file per cm2 | 3000 .doc | 6000 .doc | 23'800 .doc |
Distance between a reading head and the surface
A read/write head's size is close to 12 nanometers, or 0.000012 millimeters. The platters, that are spinning very fast, create a 250km/h draught on the platters surface. This allows the reading heads to fly over the surface, thanks to the bearing capacity.
The least unevenness on the platter will damage the reading irreparably, then the rest of the surface will be damaged because of the domino effect.
| 0.000001 millimeters | = | 1 nanometer |
| Dist. between head and surface | = | 7 nanometers |
| Virus | = | 10 to 400 nanometers |
| Thin dust | = | 6'000 nanometers |
| Very thin hair | = | 50'000 nanometers |