Hitachi Eyes 1TB Desktop Drives
Hitachi Global will release its next-generation hard-disk drives, promising vastly increased capacities, later this year.
Source: TechWorldThe drives used perpendicular recording, a yet-to-be commercialized recording method that should enable engineers to continue increasing storage capacity.
The company is already testing sample drives based on perpendicular recording and says the technology could allow for 1TB desktop drives or 20GB Microdrives in 2007.
It is in a race with Toshiba, which also expects to release its perpendicular drives in the middle of the year, promising equally enormous rises in capacity.
Perpendicular recording is perhaps the most significant near-term step in the evolution of hard-disk drive technology. The method is similar to the longitudinal recording used in today's drives in that it relies on magnetically charged particles for data storage. In today's drives, the north and south poles of the magnetic particles run parallel to the disc but in the new method they are arranged perpendicular to the disc, as the name suggests.
The result of this new arrangement is that each particle occupies a smaller area of the disk's surface and so more particles can be crammed onto the disk. This is measured as the areal density and today's most advanced drives can store between 100 gigabits and 120 gigabits of data in a square inch of disk space.
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