Seagate Claims Magnetic Storage Record

By Geoff Duncan September 15, 2006

Storage maker Seagate announced today that it has broken the world record for data density on magnetic media, cramming some 421 gigabits per square inch (Gbit/in²) using perpendicular recording technology on—get this—currently available production equipment, rather than lab- and cleanroom-only prototype gizmos. Seagate broke the news at IDEMA DISKCON show, which is celebrating the 50th anniversary of the hard drive.

That first hard drive? The IBM 350, offering 5 MB of storage, and it literally weighed a ton.

Seagate’s demonstration of the data densities which can be achieved with current production equipment paves the way for ever-greater storage capacities in existing disk formats. Seagate expects increases in density will lead to the development of drives with capacities from 40 GB to 275 GB in 1-inch and 1.8-inch formats (commonly used in media players and consumer electronics devices), up to 500 GB for 2.5-inch drives commonly used in notebooks, and up to almost 2.5 TB for 2.5-inch drives used in desktop and server systems. A 2.5 TB drive would hold more than 40,000 hours of music or 4,000 hours of digital video using typical encoding technology.

“Today’s demonstration, combined with recent technology announcements from fellow hard drive companies, clearly shows that the future of hard drives is stronger than ever,” said Bill Watkins, CEO of Seagate. “Breakthroughs in areal density are enabling the digital revolution and clearly indicate that hard drives can sustain their advantage to meet the world’s insatiable demand for storage across a wide range of market segments.”

Seagate’s demonstration had a track density of 275,000 tracks per inch, with a linear density of 1.53 billion bits per inch; the device sustained data rates of 735 megabits per second—in raw terms, a little over 90 MB/sec.

Just remember, kids: regular and reliable data backups are your very best friend.

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Geoff Duncan writes, programs, edits, plays music, and delights in making software misbehave. He's probably the only member…

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