Digital Trends

Hitachi has announced that it’s made a breakthrough in disk drive read-head technology that could mean the quadrupling of hard drive capacities. The company claims that could mean a four terabyte (TB) hard drive on your desktop and one TB on your notebook.

 

Company researchers have more than halved recording heads so they’re now in the 30-50 nanometer (nm) range - 2,000 times smaller than the width of an average human hair. Hitachi expects to have this technology up and running on its computers by 2009, and for it to reach its full potential by 2011.

 

Hitachi will present its new research at the 8th Perpendicular Magnetic Recording Conference (PMRC 2007), to be held 15th -17th October 2007, at the Tokyo International Forum in Japan.

 

“Hitachi continues to invest in deep research for the advancement of hard disk drives as we believe there is no other technology capable of providing the hard drive's high-capacity, low-cost value for the foreseeable future," Hiroaki Odawara, Research Director, Storage Technology Research Center, Central Research Laboratory, Hitachi, Ltd. Said in a statement. "This is an achievement for consumers as much as it is for Hitachi. It allows Hitachi to fuel the growth of the ‘Terabyte Era’ of storage, which we started, and gives consumers virtually limitless ability for storing their digital content."