Electronics giant Hitachi today announced that the company has achieved a technologic breakthrough that will allow for desktop computer hard drives to grow in capacity to 4-terabytes by 2011. Though various and continual advances in HDD technology have allowed current models to reach a single terabyte in capacity, the product of a general trend of capacity doubling every year, room for further growth via the currently favored tunneling magneto-resistance head technology appeared limited.
Hitachi's new breakthrough is the result of the company's revitalization of the decade-old breakthrough of "giant magnetoresistance" (GMR) heads. The crux of the challenge of increasing HDD capacity is the fact that as the "tracks" (areas of data on an HDD platter) are increasingly shrunk and spaced closer together, the ability of the reading "heads" in the HDD to recognize them is made massively more difficult due to electrical resistance and interference noise.
By refining the older GMR head technology via reengineering current flow and applying new nanotechnology developed materials, Hitachi states that its new "CCP-GMR" (Current Perpendicular to the Plane-Giant Magnetoresistance) heads are able to read tracks spaced just 50-nanometers or less apart. As such, while current HDDs are able to store around 200-gigabits per square inch of platter, Hitachi's new technology will allow up to 1-terabit in the same space.
Hitachi states that it will be able to bring the technology to market as early as 2009, with capacity expected to reach 4-TB for desktops and 1-TB for laptops by 2011. With such capacity available at a consumer price, the future of storing very large amounts of HD video in DVRs and mobile devices is far brighter.
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