Hitachi Global Storage Technologies plans to announce Monday it has developed technology that will quadruple the storage capacity of desktop hard drives within the next two years.
The new reading-head technology will allow the company to cram more data on hard drives, enabling desktop and laptop drives to store 4TB and 1TB of data, respectively.
Hard drives are currently doubling in capacity every two years, said John Best, chief technologist at Hitachi Global Storage Technologies. The new reading-head technology will allow an even greater capacity boost while shrinking the size of disk drives, Best said.
The company hopes to implement the technology in hard drives in 2009.
As hard drives shrink, magnetic fields become harder to detect, so the reading head has to be more sensitive, Best said. The heads made with Hitachi’s new CPP-GMR (current perpendicular-to-the-plane GMR) material are more sensitive than existing reading heads and detect the magnetic field better, Best said.
The CPP-GMR heads will enable the density of disk storage surfaces to increase to 500G bits per square inch or more in the near future, Best said. The greater the density of the storage surface, the more data the surface can hold. The current density stands at about 200G bits per square inch, he said.
The technology will help to meet future storage needs fueled by video and Web 2.0 applications, Best said.
