Hitachi to Quadruple HDD Capacity by 2011?

By Greg McNevin

October 16, 2007: Hitachi is making waves this week, announcing that it has achieved a significant nanotechnology milestone and potentially quadrupled hard disk storage capabilities with a new teeny-tiny read head.

The company claims it has achieved a 2x reduction of nanometer recording technology to the 30-50 nanometer (nm) range. This is up to 2,000 times smaller than the width of an average human hair (approx. 70-100 microns) and means we could be seeing 1TB notebook and 4TB desktop PCs could be with us by 2011.

Enigmatically called “current perpendicular-to-the-plane giant magneto-resistive” (CPP-GMR) heads, Hitachi's expects the new technology to be worming its way into its product line by 2009, and really hitting its stride by 2011.

The company expects its CPP-GMR heads to enable hard disk drive (HDD) recording densities of 500 gigabits per square inch (Gb/in2) to one terabit per square inch (Tb/in2) to be achieved. A significant jump on the 148 Gb/in2 it achieved earlier this year in its industry-first 1TB hard drive.

“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,” said Hiroaki Odawara, Research Director, Storage Technology Research Centre, Central Research Laboratory, Hitachi, Ltd.

“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.”

While storage capacity continues to grow at an exponential rate, the performance of traditional magnetic hard drives has not similarly improved, and is being constantly outclassed by new solid state storage (SSD) technology. SSD technology is in no position to take over, however, as it remains both costly and limited in capacity.

But as they say, if you can’t beat them, join them. With both technologies showing their benefits, hybrid drives could end up giving us the best of both worlds. The question is, will storage nirvana arrive when 32GB flash / 1TB magnetic hybrids do?

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