HardDriveCapacity
Latest
Seagate hits one terabit per square inch, compares self favorably to the Milky Way
You know that big new hard drive you just picked up? Get ready to feel bad. Seagate today is talking up the fact that it has managed to cram one terabit (that's one trillion bits, for the record) into a square inch. That super-dense storage comes thanks to heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology, a successor to the perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) being utilized in current hard drives. The manufacturer sees the technology hitting the market later this decade, "doubl[ing] the storage capacity of today's hard drives" in its wake. Just how many bits are we talking about here? Let Seagate put things into astronomical perspective: "The bits within a square inch of disk space, at the new milestone, far outnumber stars in the Milky Way, which astronomers put between 200 billion and 400 billion." More info can be found in the press release after the break.
Toshiba's NC-MR technology could boost HDD capacity 'tenfold'
Just days after Fujitsu tooted its own horn and suggested that it could increase hard drive capacity by 500-percent in a mere two years comes word that Toshiba coincidentally has a similarly grandiose claim. Aside from the obvious leapfrog game that's being played here, Tosh has apparently been working hand-in-hand with Tohoku University to develop "a phenomenon" dubbed Nanocontact Magnetic Resistance, or NC-MR, in which an "enormous difference in magnetoresistance is achieved when two magnetic materials are situated close together and connected by a contact point that narrows to around 1-nanometer." Put simply, the prototype NC-MR structure is twice as large as today's read heads, and elements based on the NC-MR structure would have a "lower resistance than existing TMR elements, enabling the read heads to be miniaturized and still operate quickly." Of course, these sensational claims have yet to make it beyond the drawing board, and while you may be anxious to get one of these in your rig, you'll be waiting about five years or so if things continue as planned. [Warning: Read link requires subscription]
