While everyone is waiting for the price of
128GB SSDs or hell, the
32GB variety to bottom-out, Samsung and others have been quietly beefing up their slim, 1.8-inch N-Series hard drives from 20 to 30 to 40 and now... 60GB using perpendicular recording techniques. Better yet, Sammy's drives are just 5-mm thin, spin at 4,200rpm, and feature a (relatively) quick 7.14-millisecond average seek time and a 2MB data buffer. It's not silent like an SSD but they do squeeze the noise down to 1.8 dB -- just above the human threshold for healthy ears (read:
not yours). Of course, Sammy calls it a world's first even though
Seagate began shipping their 5-mm, 60GB, single platter 1.8-inch hard drive more than two weeks ago. Ah well, so goes the hyperbole. While we're waiting for
Tosh's chubby (8-mm thick) 100GB cousin to get an iPod fitting, the skids are now greased for a
60GB PSP on the quick...
or not.
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?
