Hitachi paves the way to 24TB disks

November 26, 2010 | 17:31

Tags: #areal-density #magnetic-media

Companies: #hitachi #japan

Researchers from Hitachi and the New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organisation in Japan have developed a new technology that could lead to 24TB hard drives.

The technology, which CDRInfo describes as a harnessing of the self-arrangement properties of polymer materials, allows for magnetic structures measuring just 10nm to be created - increasing areal densities for magnetic media by a whopping eight times over current methods.

The high-density technology, which equates to an areal density of 3.9TBdot/inch², could increase the storage capacity of high-end 3.5in hard-drives to a whopping 24TB. If the company can get the new format to market quickly enough and cheaply enough, it should guarantee disk's dominance over SSD for high-capacity storage situations for quite some time to come.

As well as improved capacities, an increase in data density should, in theory, comes with an increase in data transfer speed and a decrease in seek time - just in time to take advantage of the slowly increasing support for the SATA 6Gb/sec standard.

Sadly, details on when drives featuring the technology will be coming to market will have to wait: Hitachi is expected to present a paper on the technology at the Material Research Society's autumn meeting at the end of this month, after which more details should become available.

Are you pleased to see manufacturers still working on new disk technologies, or should companies be ditching magnetic media and concentrating on making SSDs larger and cheaper? Share your thoughts over in the forums.
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