Hitachi Breaks Through Terabyte Barrier

"Hitachi researchers, who say that the new CPP-GMR hard disk read heads will enable hard drive recording densities of up to one terabit per square inch, a quadrupling of today's highest areal densities in hard drives, expect to incorporate CPP-GMR technology into products in 2009 and predict the technology will reach its full potential in 2011.

Corporations and consumers who crave more storage on their PCs can rest assured that hard drive makers are working to push well beyond the terabyte barrier. Hitachi claims it has developed the world's smallest read-head technology, and expects its breakthrough to quadruple current storage capacity limits to four terabytes for desktop hard drives and one terabyte for notebook drives.

A terabyte of storage space is equivalent to about one million books, 250,000 digital songs, or 250 hours of high-definition video.

"Hitachi continues to invest in deep research for the advancement of hard disk drives as we believe there is no other technology capable of providing the hard drive's high-capacity, low-cost value for the foreseeable future," Hiroaki Odawara, research director for Hitachi's Storage Technology Research Center, said in a statement.

John Rydning, research manager for IDC's Storage Mechanisms: Disk program, called Hitachi's breakthrough an evolutionary step for hard disk technology. What this means for the market is the possibility of a 1-TB drive in a 2.5-inch format several years from now, Rydning said."

Read full article at Sci-Tech-Today.