Fujitsu building a bigger, smaller hard drive
Fujitsu looks to be doing its part to fulfill our ever-increasing appetite for data storage, recently unveiling a new technology that it says will allow for hard drives with far greater capacity than current drives while still keeping the physical size down. The key to cracking that nut is apparently the new thermal assisted optical element Fujitsu's developed, allowing for an ultra-tiny sub-hundred nanometer optical spot size, which in turn should enable recording on the one terabit (not byte, let's not get crazy here) per square inch level. According to Fujitsu, the end result will be drives with a capacity ten times greater than what's possible using current hard drive technologies, though there's unfortunately no indication when the average user will actually be able to slot one of these magical drives into their PC. This, of course, isn't the first advancement Fujitsu has made in hard drive technology, with the company also recently announcing that it was turning to advanced lubricants to help hit the 1 Tbit per square inch mark. Drives based on that technology were said to be on track for 2010 -- let's hope this latest development speeds things up a bit.
[Via Physorg]
