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Gordon F. Hughes

Associate Project Scientist

Dr. Hughes' past work at CMRR included 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 was the principal investigator of the S.M.A.R.T., iStor/iDrive, and Secure Erase projects. S.M.A.R.T. was 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 studied putting computing tasks inside disk drives, managed by intelligent storage systems, beyond the historic disk drive role of data storage and retrieval. These programs were sponsored by the UCSD Information Storage Industry Center, a Sloan Foundation Center.

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.

More at HardDriveTheNovel.com

Hard Drive novel cover

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 past work at CMRR included 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 was the principal investigator of the S.M.A.R.T. and iDrive projects. S.M.A.R.T. was 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 studied putting computing tasks inside disk drives, beyond their basic role of data storage and retrieval. These programs were sponsored by the UCSD Information Storage Industry Center, a Sloan Foundation Center.

Publications

1967 - 1980

  1. “Feed-forward threshold logic nets for digital switching and pattern recognition”, G.F. Hughes, IEEE Transactions on Electronic Computers, Vol. EC-16, No. 4, (August 1967), pp. 463-472. [PDFUCSD only]
  2. “Comments on the mean accuracy of statistical pattern recognizers'ce”, K. Abend, T.J. Harley Jr., B. Chandrasekaran, T.J. Harley, and G.F. Hughes, IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, Vol.IT-15, No. 3, (May 1969), pp. 420-423. [PDF UCSD only]
  3. “Number of pattern classifier design samples per class”, G.F. Hughes, IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, Vol.IT-15, No. 5, (Sept. 1969), pp. 615-618. [PDF UCSD only]
  4. “Calculating recording head sensitivity”, G.F. Hughes, 1971 Digests of the International Magnetics (intermag.) Conference. IEEE. (1971), pp. 1.
  5. “Narrow recording heads”, G.F. Hughes, 1974 Digests of the Intermag. Conference. IEEE. (1974), pp. 23-5/1.
  6. “On noise in digital recording”, G.F. Hughes and R.K. Schmidt, IEEE Transactions on Magnetics, Vol. MAG-12, No. 6, (Nov. 1976), pp. 752-754. [PDF UCSD only]
  7. “Recording heat side read/write effects”, G.F. Hughes and D.S. Bloomberg, IEEE Transactions on Magnetics, Vol. MAG-13, No. 5, (Sept. 1977), pp. 1457-1460. [PDF UCSD only]
  8. “Status of Co-P recording media”, G.F. Hughes, Journal of Applied Physics, Vol. 49, No. 3, pt. 2, (March 1978), pp. 1837. [PDF UCSD only]
  9. “Analytic determination of overwrite capability in magnetic recording systems”, D.S. Bloomberg, G.F. Hughes, and R.J. Hoffman, IEEE Transactions on Magnetics, Vol. MAG-15, No. 6, (Nov. 1979), pp. 1450-1452. [PDF UCSD only]

1981 - 1990

  1. “Not just another self-consistent magnetic recording model”, G.F. Hughes, D.S. Bloomberg, V. Castelli, and R. Hoffman, IEEE Transactions on Magnetics, Vol. MAG-17, No. 2, (March 1981), pp. 1192-1199. [PDF UCSD only]
  2. “Thin film recording head efficiency and noise”, G.F. Hughes, Journal of Applied Physics, Vol. 54, No. 7, (July 1983), pp. 4168-4173. [PDFUCSD only]
  3. “Magnetization reversal in cobalt-phosphorus films”, G.F. Hughes, Journal of Applied Physics, Vol. 54, No. 9, (Sept. 1983), pp. 5306-5313. [PDF UCSD only]
  4. “Carbon overcoat and the process dependence on its microstructure and wear characteristics”, M.R. Khan, N. Heiman, R.D. Fisher, S. Smith, M. Smallen, G.F. Hughes, K. Veirs, B. Marchon, D.F. Ogletree, M. Salmeron, and W. Siekhaus, IEEE Transactions on Magnetics, Vol. 24, No. 6, (Nov. 1988), pp. 2647-2649. [PDF UCSD only]

1991 - 2000

  1. “Time interval analysis errors in measuring recording media transition jitter”, G.F. Hughes, X. Che, and R.S. Beach, IEEE Transactions on Magnetics, Vol. 33, No. 6, (Nov. 1997), pp. 4475-4481. [PDF UCSD only]
  2. “Bit errors due to channel modulation of media jitter”, G.F. Hughes, IEEE Transactions on Magnetics, Vol. 34, No. 5, Pt. 2, (Sept. 1998), pp. 3799-3805. [PDF UCSD only]
  3. “Writing on perpendicular patterned media at high density and data rate”, E.D. Boerner, H.N. Bertram, and G.F. Hughes, Journal of Applied Physics, Vol. 85, No. 8, (April 1999), pp. 5318-5320. [PDFUCSD only]
  4. “Read channels for patterned media”, G.F. Hughes, IEEE Transactions on Magnetics, Vol. 35, No. 5, Pt. 1, (Sept. 1999), pp. 2310-2312. [PDF UCSD only]
  5. “Analysis of tape surface roughness by magnetic recording and mechanical methods”, P. Luo, S. Tan, H.N. Bertram, G.F. Hughes and F.E. Talke, IEEE Transactions on Magnetics, Vol. 36, No. 1, (January 2000), pp.3984-3990. [PDF UCSD only]
  6. “Patterned media write designs”, G.F. Hughes, IEEE Transactions on Magnetics, Vol. 36, No. 2, (March 2000), pp. 521-527. [PDF UCSD only]
  7. “Magnetic analysis of contact head/tape spacing spacing”, P. Luo, S. Tan, H.N. Bertram, G.F. Hughes and F.E. Talke, IEEE Transactions on Magnetics, Vol. 36, No. 6, (Nov 2000), pp. 3984-3990. [PDF UCSD only]

2001 - 2004

  1. “Trends in disk drives and data security”, G.F. Hughes, Information Technology Study Group Workshop, April 5-6, 2001, San Diego California (invited)
  2. “Patterned media”, Chapter 7, G.F. Hughes, The Physics of High Density Magnetic Recording, edited by Jan van Ek, Dieter Weller, and Martin Plumer (Springer, Heidelberg, June 2001)
  3. “Patterned media recording systems - the potential and the problems”, G.F. Hughes, Intermag Europe 2002 Digest of Technical Papers. 2002 IEEE International Magnetics Conference, (April 2002), pp. GA6. [PDF UCSD only]
  4. “Viterbi detector with added noise detection channel”, G.F. Hughes, Intermag Europe 2002 Digest of Technical Papers. 2002 IEEE International Magnetics Conference, (April 2002), pp. EC5. [PDFUCSD only]
  5. “Secure erase of disk drive data”, G.F. Hughes, T. Coughlin, Insight, Vol. 15, (July 2002), pp. 22-25. [PDF UCSD only] (under Idema Newsletter, Summer 2002
  6. “Wise drives [hard disk drive]”, G.F. Hughes, IEEE Spectrum, Vol. 39, No. 8, (August. 2002), pp. 37-41. [PDF UCSD only]
  7. “Improved disk-drive failure warnings”, G.F. Hughes, J.F. Murray, K. Kreutz-Delgado, C. Elkan, IEEE Transactions on Reliability, Vol. 51, No. 3, (Sept. 2002), pp. 350-357. [PDF UCSD only]
  8. “Read channels for prepatterned media with trench playback”, G.F. Hughes, IEEE Transactions on Magnetics, Vol. 39, No. 5, Pt. 2, (September 2003), pp. 2564-2566. [PDF UCSD only]

2005 -

  1. “Reliability and security of RAID storage systems and D2D archives using SATA disk drives”, G.F. Hughes and J.F. Murray, ACM Transactions on Storage, Vol. 1, No. 1, (February 2005), pp. 95-107. [PDF UCSD only]
  2. “Machine learning methods for predicting failures in hard drives: A multiple-instance application”, J.F. Murray, G.F. Hughes, and K. Kreutz-Delgado, Journal of Machine Learning Research, Vol. 6, (2005), pp. 783-816. [PDF UCSD only]
  3. “Disposal of disk and tape data by secure sanitization”, G.F. Hughes, D.M. Commins, and T. Coughlin, IEEE Security and Privacy, Vol.7, No. 4, (July/August 2009), pp. 29-34. [PDF UCSD only]

Patents

  1. Linear motor actuator, G. F. Hughes, US Patent Number: 3,889,13910 June 1975