A Four Terabyte Hard Drive?

Hitachi has achieved a breakthrough that could quadruple hard drive capacities.

Hitachi has announced that it’s made a breakthrough in disk drive read-head technology that could mean the quadrupling of hard drive capacities. Thecompany claims that could mean a four terabyte (TB) hard drive on your desktop and one TB on your notebook.   Company researchers have more than halved recording heads so they’re now inthe 30-50 nanometer (nm) range – 2,000 times smaller than the width of an average human hair. Hitachi expects to have this technology up and running on its computers by 2009, and for it to reach itsfull potential by 2011.   Hitachi will present its new research at the 8th Perpendicular Magnetic Recording Conference (PMRC 2007), to beheld 15th -17th October 2007, at the Tokyo International Forum in Japan.   “Hitachi continues to invest in deep research for the advancement of hard disk drives as we believe there is noother technology capable of providing the hard drive’s high-capacity, low-cost value for the foreseeable future," Hiroaki Odawara, Research Director, Storage Technology Research Center, CentralResearch Laboratory, Hitachi, Ltd. Said in a statement. "This is an achievement for consumers as much as it is for Hitachi. It allows Hitachi to fuel the growth of the ‘Terabyte Era’of storage, which we started, and gives consumers virtually limitless ability for storing their digital content."