Center for Magnetic Recording Research

Research Interests

Dr. Hughes current work at CMRR includes research on recording physics and channels; a new disk technology to replace thin film called patterned media; intelligent disk drives for intelligent storage systems and to allow product differentiation for drive manufacturers; experimental magnetic tape and disk programs; and disk drive failure prediction.

He is principal investigator of the S.M.A.R.T., iStor/iDrive, and Secure Erase projects. S.M.A.R.T. is the UCSD/CMRR research program for experimental monitoring and databasing of disk drive failure warning data, for analysis by statistical hypothesis testing, data mining, artificial intelligence, and pattern recognition techniques. The iDrive project studies putting computing tasks inside disk drives, managed by intelligent storage systems, beyond the historic disk drive role of data storage and retrieval. These programs are sponsored by the UCSD Information Storage Industry Center, a Sloan Foundation Center.

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Read Gordon's tale of Seagate Technology, as a cowboy Silicon Valley startup company that grew into today's largest computer storage company in "Hard Drive: As the Disc Turns," an adventure novel recently published by Amazon.com.

Biography

Gordon Hughes received his BS in Physics and Ph.D in Electrical Engineering at Cal Tech. He did digital magnetic recording research at Xerox PARC on oxide and thin film plated discs, on heads and channels; and then formed a development group at Seagate to commercialize new recording technology, where he helped to establish sputtered thin film metallic recording media as todays commercial standard.  

Gordon joined CMRR in 1997 as Associate Director. He has published many technical papers on recording physics and recording channels, has several patents, and was a Distinguished Lecturer for the Magnetics Society of the IEEE in 1989 and 1998.

In 2001, he was named Fellow of the IEEE for "contributions to magnetic recording physics and for pioneering work in thin film disk media".  

His current work at CMRR includes research on recording physics and channels; a new disk technology to replace thin film called patterned media; intelligent disk drives for improved storage systems and to allow product differentiation for drive manufacturers; experimental tape and disk magnetic recording programs at CMRR; and disk drive failure prediction.

He is principal investigator of the S.M.A.R.T. and iDrive projects. S.M.A.R.T. is the UCSD/CMRR research program for experimental monitoring and databasing of disk drive failure warning data, for analysis by statistical hypothesis testing, data mining, artificial intelligence, and pattern recognition techniques. The iDrive project studies putting computing tasks inside disk drives, beyond their basic role of data storage and retrieval.  These programs are sponsored by the UCSD Information Storage Industry Center, a Sloan Foundation Center.

Publications

1967-1980

1981-1990

1991-2000

2001-2004

2005-

Patents

1967-1980                                            Back to Top

G.F. Hughes, “Feed-Forward threshold logic nets for digital switching and pattern recognition,” IEEE Transactions on Electronic Computers, Vol. EC-16, No. 4, (August 1967), pp. 463-472. [PDF  ucsd only]

K. Abend, T.J.  Harley Jr., B.  Chandrasekaran, T.J.  Harley, G.F.  Hughes,   “Comments `On the mean accuracy of statistical pattern recognizers'ce,”
IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, Vol.IT-15, No.3, (May 1969), pp. 420-3. [PDF  ucsd only]

G.F. Hughes, “Number of pattern classifier design samples per class,” IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, Vol.IT-15, No.5, (Sept. 1969), pp. 615-18. [PDF  ucsd only]

G.F. Hughes, “Calculating recording head sensitivity,” 1971 Digests of the International Magnetics (intermag.) Conference. IEEE. (1971), pp. 1.

G.F. Hughes, “Narrow recording heads,” 1974 Digests of the Intermag. Conference. IEEE. (1974), pp. 23-5/1.

G.F. Hughes, R.K. Schmidt, “On noise in digital recording,” IEEE Transactions on Magnetics, Vol. MAG-12, No. 6, (Nov. 1976), pp. 752-4. [PDF ucsd only]                    

G.F. Hughes, D.S. Bloomberg, “Recording heat side read/write effects,” IEEE Transactions on Magnetics, Vol. MAG-13, No. 5, (Sept. 1977), pp. 1457-60. [PDF ucsd only]

G.F. Hughes, “Status of Co-P recording media,” Journal of Applied Physics, Vol. 49, No. 3, pt. 2, (March 1978), pp. 1837. [PDF ucsd only]

D.S. Bloomberg, G.F. Hughes, R.J. Hoffman, “Analytic determination of overwrite capability in magnetic recording systems,” IEEE Transactions on Magnetics, Vol. MAG-15, No. 6, (Nov. 1979), pp. 1450-2. [PDF ucsd only]

1981-1990                                                   Back to Top

G.F. Hughes, D.S. Bloomberg, V. Castelli, R. Hoffman, “Not just another self-consistent magnetic recording model,” IEEE Transactions on Magnetics, Vol. MAG-17, No. 2, (March 1981), pp. 1192-9. [PDF ucsd only]

G.F. Hughes, “Thin film recording head efficiency and noise,” Journal of Applied Physics, Vol. 54, No. 7, (July 1983), pp. 4168-73. [PDF ucsd only]

G.F. Hughes, “Magnetization reversal in cobalt-phosphorus films,” Journal of Applied Physics, Vol. 54, No. 9, (Sept. 1983), pp. 5306-13. [PDF ucsd only]

M.R. Khan, N. Heiman, R.D. Fisher, S. Smith, M. Smallen, G.F. Hughes, K. Veirs, B. Marchon, D.F. Ogletree, M. Salmeron, W. Siekhaus, “Carbon overcoat and the process dependence on its microstructure and wear characteristics,” IEEE Transactions on Magnetics, Vol. 24, No. 6, (Nov. 1988), pp. 2647-9. [PDF ucsd only]

1991-2000                                                    Back to Top

G.F. Hughes, X. Che, R.S. Beach, “Time interval analysis errors in measuring recording media transition jitter,” IEEE Transactions on Magnetics, Vol. 33, No. 6, (Nov. 1997), pp. 4475-81. [PDF ucsd only]

G.F. Hughes, “Bit errors due to channel modulation of media jitter,” IEEE Transactions on Magnetics, Vol. 34, No. 5, Pt. 2, (Sept. 1998), pp. 3799-805. [PDF ucsd only]

E.D. Boerner, H.N. Bertram, G.F. Hughes, “Writing on perpendicular patterned media at high density and data rate,” Journal of Applied Physics, Vol. 85, No. 8, (April 1999), pp. 5318-20. [PDF ucsd only]

G.F. Hughes, “Read channels for patterned media,” IEEE Transactions on Magnetics, Vol. 35, No. 5, Pt. 1, (Sept. 1999), pp. 2310-12. [PDF ucsd only]

P. Luo, S. Tan, H.N. Bertram, G.F. Hughes and F.E. Talke, “Analysis of tape surface roughness by magnetic recording and mechanical methods,” IEEE Transactions on Magnetics, Vol. 36, No. 1, (January 2000), pp. 3984-3990. [PDF ucsd only]

G.F. Hughes, “Patterned media write designs,” IEEE Transactions on Magnetics, Vol. 36, No. 2, (March 2000), pp. 521-7. [PDF ucsd only]

P. Luo, S. Tan, H.N. Bertram, G.F. Hughes, F.E. Talke, “Magnetic analysis of contact head/tape spacing spacing," IEEE Transactions on Magnetics, Vol. 36, No. 6 (Nov 2000), pp. 3984-3990.  [PDF  ucsd only]

2001-2004                                                  Back to Top

G.F. Hughes, “Trends in disk drives and data security,” Information Technology Study Group Workshop, April 5-6, 2001, San Diego California (invited)

G.F. Hughes, “Patterned media," Chapter 7, The Physics of High Density Magnetic Recording, edited by Jan van Ek, Dieter Weller, and Martin Plumer (Springer, Heidelberg, June 2001)

G.F. Hughes, “Patterned media recording systems - the potential and the problems,” Intermag Europe 2002 Digest of Technical Papers. 2002 IEEE International Magnetics Conference, (April 2002), pp. GA6. [PDF ucsd only]

G.F. Hughes. “Viterbi detector with added noise detection channel,” Intermag Europe 2002 Digest of Technical Papers. 2002 IEEE International Magnetics Conference, (April 2002), pp. EC5. [PDF ucsd only]

G.F. Hughes, T. Coughlin, “Secure erase of disk drive data,” Insight, Vol. 15, (July 2002), pp. 22-25. [PDF ucsd only] (under Idema Newsletter, Summer 2002

G.F. Hughes, “Wise drives [hard disk drive],” IEEE Spectrum, Vol. 39, No. 8, (August. 2002), pp. 37-41. [PDF ucsd only]

G.F. Hughes, J.F. Murray, K. Kreutz-Delgado, C. Elkan, “Improved disk-drive failure warnings,” IEEE Transactions on Reliability, Vol. 51, No. 3, (Sept. 2002), pp. 350-7. [PDF ucsd only]

G.F. Hughes, “Read channels for prepatterned media with trench playback,” IEEE Transactions on Magnetics, Vol. 39, No. 5, Pt. 2, (September 2003), pp. 2564-2566. [PDF ucsd only]

2005-                                                       Back to Top

G.F. Hughes, J.F. Murray, “Reliability and security of RAID storage systems and D2D archives using SATA disk drives,” ACM Transactions on Storage, Vol. 1, No. 1, (February 2005), pp. 95-107. [PDF ucsd only]

J.F. Murray, G.F. Hughes, K. Kreutz-Delgado, “Machine learning methods for predicting failures in hard drives: A multiple-instance application,” Journal of Machine Learning Research, Vol. 6, (2005), pp. 783-816.
[PDF  ucsd only]

Patents

G. F. Hughes, Linear motor actuator. Patent Number: 3,889,139 
10 June 1975

Research Group

 

Graduate Student:

Student Name: Tasha Vanosian

email: tcvanesi@ucsd.edu

Phone: (858) 534-0026

Fax: (858) 534-2720

Office: CMRR Room 103

Lab Assistant:

Student Name: Daniel Commins

email: dcommins@ucsd.edu

Phone: (858) 534-0026

Fax:(858) 534-2720

Office: CMRR Lab 2D

Student Name: Logan Straatemeier

email: straatemeier@gmail.com

Phone: (858) 534-0026

Fax: (858) 534-2720

Office: CMRR Room 103