Gordon Hughes

Gordon Frierson Hughes (born September 9, 1937), is an American engineer and computer scientist. Hughes was born in Los Angeles California. While at high school, he designed and built an early digital computer using vacuum tubes and telephone dials, marking an early interest in computer technology.

Career and pursuits

Dr. Hughes is a scientist, engineer, and author of the book Hard Drive!

He received a BS degree in Physics (1959), and Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering (1963) from Caltech, with a thesis in computer switching theory. After working in magnetic recording research for the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, he established Seagate Technology's first Recording Technology group to develop and commercialize new technology for hard disk drives, including sputtered thin film cobalt recording media, universal today in all computer hard disk drives, with over a billion cobalt disks manufactured in 2009.

He is presently a Project Scientist at the Center for Magnetic Recording Research University of California San Diego, where he works and consults on information storage systems and magnetic recording. In 1999 he proposed the first write and read recording channel design concepts for patterned media - a future high-density disk storage technology.

Research

Hughes' research work at CMRR includes hard disk drive secure data erasure - also known as data sanitization. His hard drive secure erase freeware program has been downloaded by hundreds of thousands of computer users, to issue the hard drive Secure Erase command first proposed by CMRR, which is rated at the highest level of software sanitization approval by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST 800-88). Additionally, he has studied disc drive reliability from a user's viewpoint (references below).

As an IEEE Distinguished Lecturer in 1989 and 1999, Hughes gave talks in America and Europe, describing how hard drives will continue their half century of storage capacity progress, increasing by a factor of over ten every decade.

Awards

Hughes was made a Life Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers "for contributions to magnetic recording physics and pioneering work in thin film disc media,"^[1] as described in Hard Drive.

As 2003-2004 Chair of the IEEE Reynold B Johnson Field Award committee, he organized a new Field Award for advances in Storage Systems and Storage Devices. He is a member of Sigma Xi and Tau Beta Pi.

Hobbies

Hughes is a 4000-hour multiengine and instrument rated airplane pilot.

Notes

1. ^ "Fellows in Region 6 - Western USA". IEEE. http://www.ieee.org/web/membership/fellows/Regional/region_six.html. 

Hard Drive!, a Silicon Valley adventure novel

Vertical and horizontal patterned media writing, 1999 IEEE Intermag Conference, Korea, May 1999

Read channels for patterned media, IEEE Trans. Mag., vol. 35, pp. 2310-2312, Sept. 1999

Patterned media write designs, IEEE Trans. Mag., vol. 36, March 2000

“Patterned media, in Physics of High Density Magnetic Recording, Chapter 7,Jan van Ek (ed), Dieter Weller, and Martin Plumer (Springer, Heidelberg, June 2001)

"Disposal of Disk and Tape Data by Secure Sanitization, G F Hughes, D. Commons, T. Coughlin, IEEE Security and Privacy, July/August 2009

Reliability and Security of RAID Storage Systems and D2D Archives using SATA Disk Drives, ACM Transactions on Storage, February 2005

Persondata
Name	Hughes, Gordon
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth	September 9, 1937
Place of birth
Date of death
Place of death