Disk-Drive Makers Keep on Racing To Raise Capacity
September 13, 2006
Some dueling disk-drive makers are claiming new records for storing data, extending a technology that is celebrating its 50th anniversary in Silicon Valley this week.
A unit of Hitachi Ltd. plans to announce today that its researchers have demonstrated the ability to store 345 gigabits -- or billions of bits -- of data per square inch on a disk. That compares with a maximum of 133 gigabits a square inch in disk drives now on the market.
Not to be outdone, rival Seagate Technology of Scotts Valley, Calif., plans to disclose research results with storage capacities of 421 gigabits of data per inch.
It can take years for new techniques for magnetically encoding bits of data to be incorporated into disk drives. Hitachi, based in Tokyo, said last year that it was able to achieve 230 gigabits per square inch in the laboratory, for example, and isn't offering that capability in its products.
By 2009, however, Hitachi predicts that its 345-gigabit technology could dramatically increase the capacity of today's disk drives. A 3.5-inch drive for desktop computers, for example, is expected to store two terabytes, or trillions of bytes, of data -- about 2½ times today's maximum of 750 gigabytes, the company said.
Seagate, meanwhile, is expecting by 2010 to hit a density of 500 gigabits a square inch, allowing 3.5-inch drives that could store three terabytes. A one-inch drive, a size now used in small mobile devices, could store 80 gigabytes; Seagate's most advanced product at that size now stores 12 gigabytes.
"We feel we will have real products by 2010 with these capacity points," said Bill Watkins, Seagate's chief executive officer.
Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, the San Jose, Calif., unit announcing the storage developments, in 2003 took over the former drive operations of International Business Machines Corp., which invented the technology in 1956. |
