Hitachi jacks perpendicular recording density to 610Gb / square inch

Hitachi sure does love some perpendicular recording, and in between making trippy videos about the tech, it seems like it's busy improving it -- the company just announced that it's increased the max storage density of magnetic recording to 610Gb per square inch. That's far denser than current techniques, and it could lead to a 2.5x increase in capacity for hard drives -- and what's more, Hitachi says it shows that hard drive capacities have the ability to increase at a rate of 40 percent annually for the foreseeable future. Looks like the Tera Era might actually be here, eh?

[Doug @ Aug 1st 2008 6:35PM]

That's "Hot stuff.. Coming through.."

[quiksilv3r @ Aug 1st 2008 6:38PM]

the worst.

[humphrey @ Aug 1st 2008 6:39PM]

Of course we all know the terabyte drives were named after Tera Patrick

[Lowest Ranked @ Aug 1st 2008 6:43PM]

By that logic, the Petabyte was named after the crazy animal rights activists?

[Johan S @ Aug 1st 2008 6:41PM]

Terabyte capacity PMP in 2014?

Hmm that means about 200 DVD quality movies .. maybe with space left over for a few thousand songs. And hopefully by 2014 widely deployed 4G cell technology would mean that storage on a portable device wont even be a requirement (you can play files of your desktop HD remotely via stuff like Microsoft Mesh or rent from a provider).

[Samboini @ Aug 1st 2008 7:31PM]

Hopefully we won't be using USB to transfer data..!

[Owen @ Aug 2nd 2008 2:15PM]

If only they could make perpetual batteries.

[Lowest Ranked @ Aug 1st 2008 6:42PM]

The hairiest chest.

[quiksilv3r @ Aug 1st 2008 6:43PM]

Sweeeet. More space for my por.........celain doll picture collection. Lots of space for those naughty, naughty porcelain dolls.

[JR @ Aug 1st 2008 6:46PM]

Oh I see what you did there.

[the tank @ Aug 1st 2008 9:39PM]

awesome

[Metkis @ Aug 1st 2008 6:44PM]

Well, I'm glad you took your browser away from 4Chan to waste your life and time here.

[kal326 @ Aug 1st 2008 6:50PM]

And the 2.5TB drives are where?

[Velorium @ Aug 1st 2008 11:46PM]

No idea. But you've gotta wonder; were they just holding off on releasing this technology until they had competition in other aspects, such as speed from other ways of storing data such as flash to get more money on old tech?

[jarnail @ Aug 1st 2008 6:57PM]

and why does my xbox only have 120gb?

[andres @ Aug 1st 2008 11:26PM]

because you didnt buy one of these hard drives.

[broli @ Aug 1st 2008 6:58PM]

Milk those damn dinosaurs!!! Dinosaur milk is the best baby. Who needs the homo ssdus.

[Lowest Ranked @ Aug 1st 2008 8:01PM]

I want the homo ssdus.

You shouldn't have to ask what for.

[John Doe @ Aug 1st 2008 7:42PM]

sounds similar to the Moore's Law

[Nihility @ Aug 1st 2008 9:01PM]

Except it doesn't.

[linuxamp @ Aug 1st 2008 7:42PM]

Size is great but what about reliability? I hear that these high density drives have a lot more errors (internally corrected) than their predecessors.

Soon you'll be able to loose terabytes with a single drive failure. Mirroring or parity RAID will probably be highly recommended. Then again, array rebuild time with this size is going to be very long. Probably need RAID 6 in case another drive fails during rebuild.

[kal326 @ Aug 1st 2008 9:05PM]

@linuxamp
Indeed 2 drives dying in a raid 5 in one day is still possible and damn annoying. Especially when the data had not been properly backed up because "it was on a redundant array".

[Mr. Magoo @ Aug 1st 2008 9:20PM]

They have a lot more errors because they pass a lot more data. The raw error rate (errors/bits passed) has stayed the same, typically 1e-6 or 1e-7. After ECC or channel correction, this is improved to 1e-12. After retries (drive tries to read the data again, multiple times if necessary, with offsets and other tweaks) the error rate improves to 1e-14 or 1e-15.

Only after all of the correction and retries are exhausted will the drive give up and report an error. This spec'd uncorrected (but detected) error rate is usually around 1e-18.

The spec'd uncorrected and undetected (i.e. the drive unknowingly sends incorrect data to the host without notifying it that there is an error) error rate is 1e-24.

[craig @ Aug 1st 2008 10:19PM]

That argument has been tossed out since the beginning of time---since the days of the 650MB 5.25" drive---and it always was and always will be BS. Until there's a compelling argument to switch to 2.5", capacities will go up and up and people will continue to buy. I'd be more than happy with 2+ TB drives.

[Jason @ Aug 1st 2008 7:46PM]

Actually I find this really exciting because I've been converting my aging DVD collection onto hard drive platters. At existing costs it's still a bit painful to do as even a 750 gig drive doesn't hold that many movies. (~130 of them). Given that it's a good idea to mirror that and other data and it's still iffy whether that's a good choice. But double or triple the capacity and I'd have no reservations about stuffing my collection in storage or whatever and going digital with redundancy.

We've been hovering quite a while on the 1TB edge, so to speak, to the point where it felt like manufacturers were trying to milk profit from that as long as possible before increasing storage. I was starting to wonder if they'd ever get around to it.

[tasteslikechicken @ Aug 1st 2008 8:10PM]

bah, 40% per year? how many years before the technology is obsolete. Flash memory or mram or nram will replace hard drives, they're at the end of their "s" curve. If I was seagate or maxtor I'd be looking for a new business to get in. And the requirements for memory are different, it's now speed, size and now energy use and size to store a given amount of data. We don't just want a terabyte, we want it on our G3 version 4 Jesus-Buddha-Mohamed phone that's built into our our glasses and recognizes our blinking and eye movements as a full gestural interface.

[Darryl @ Aug 2nd 2008 12:18AM]

All this capacity increase is great, but it seems that as soon as more space is available, something shows up to take it up. And HDD will be the storage of choice for capacity for a long time.

[Julian Bond @ Aug 2nd 2008 4:30AM]

When does the price/performance curve of SSD cross that for HDD?

And where's my 320Gb iPod Classic? Come to think of that, where's my 160Gb iTouch? And why can't you buy aftermarket 160gb 1.8" drives, did Apple buy the whole world's production?

[timid1 @ Aug 2nd 2008 1:41PM]

320 Gb (lower case b) is 40 GB (upper case B)

Similarly, 160 Gb = 20 GB

You already have these. There's a difference between Bits and Bytes. 1 bit = 8 Bytes. kthx!

[matt @ Aug 2nd 2008 4:47AM]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xb_PyKuI7II

[The Dude @ Aug 2nd 2008 1:54PM]

"I'm just a bill.
Yes, I'm only a bill.
And I'm sitting here on Capitol Hill..."

Fuck. I meant "Get Perpendicularrrrr..."

[AlphaTeam @ Aug 2nd 2008 11:58PM]

Crap, I just got a 500GB drive 2 months ago!

[Casper42 @ Aug 3rd 2008 9:25PM]

So I was curious what this 610Gb / in^2 means when it comes to GB / Platter that alot of people already know about.

Found a WD article that says their 160GB platters in 2.5 " drives (320GB Laptop drive) is the same as the 320GB platters in the 3.5" drives (WD6400AAKS) is listed at 250Gb / in^2

So by tht reasoning and math, a 610Gb/s areal density means we can expect a 780 (Call it 750) GB / platter drive in a 3.5" size. Thats means a 2.25 TB desktop drive when they eventually get this technology into a working product. Or a 750GB Laptop drive.

I would expect the newly announced Seagate? 1.5TB drive is 3 x 500GB platters which is using approx 400 Gb / in^2 technology.

So based on that, the jump doesn't seem all that impressive per say. Less than 2 years to go from 250Gb/in^2 to 400Gb/in^2 means we can expect 2TB Desktop drives and 1TB Laptop drives in 2011.

[celerysword @ Jan 22nd 2009 5:47PM]

Yes! I've just upped the max storage density to 611Gb per square inch. Turns out you have to use peanut butter. Go figure. At any rate, in your face Hitachi!