Patterned media (also known as bit-patterned media or BPM[1]) is a potential future hard disk drive technology to record data in magnetic islands (one bit per island), as opposed to current hard disk drive technology where each bit is stored in 20–30 magnetic grains within a continuous magnetic film. The islands would be patterned from a precursor magnetic film using nanolithography. It is one of the proposed technologies to succeed perpendicular recording due to the greater storage densities it would enable. BPM was introduced by Toshiba in 2010.[2]
Bit-patterned media (BPM) are a type of magnetic recording medium in which the magnetic layer is reduced to the size of one bit (one magnetic dot and space).