Tech Shout!

Hitachi has unveiled a new reading-head technology for hard disk drives which could dramatically boost storage capacity up to 4 Terabytes (TB).

The company claims that the newly developed reading-head technology is the smallest till date and is yet able to quadruple current storage capacity limits to 4TB on a desktop hard drive and 1TB on a notebook hard drive.

The new reading-head technology is called current perpendicular-to-the-plane giant magnetoresistive (CPP-GMR) heads, and is basically a reduced version of the existing recording heads in the 30nm-50nm range, making it up to 2,000 times smaller than the width of an average human hair.

Hitachi believes CPP-GMR heads will enable hard disk drive (HDD) recording density of 500 gigabits per square inch (Gb/in2) to one terabit per square inch (Tb/in2), a quadrupling of today’s highest areal densities.

The new development will help to meet the future storage requirement of multimedia stockpilers. Additionally, it will help boost the growth of Web 2.0 applications, which are entirely Web based.

According to Hiroaki Odawara, Research Director, Storage Technology Research Center, Central Research Laboratory, Hitachi, Ltd, “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.”

“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,” he added.

Hitachi’s newly developed technology is expected to be implemented in products in 2009 and is slated to reach its full potential in 2011.