p2pnet.net News:- Hitachi says its perpendicular recording technique will allow a storage density of 230 billion bits per square inch, translating into a desktop computer drive capable of storing a trillion bytes of information.

“Until now, the industry has relied on constant improvements in traditional ‘longitudinal recording’ systems that employ tiny magnetized regions laid out end to end in circular tracks,” says the New York Times. “A magnetic 1 is changed to a 0 when the polarity of the region is reversed.

“Now, however, longitudinal recording is reaching fundamental limits, and so the storage industry is preparing to make the transition to perpendicular recording.”

Perpendicular recording is, “perhaps the most significant near-term step in the evolution of hard drive technology,” says PC World. “The method is similar to the longitudinal recording used in today’s drives in that it relies on magnetically charged particles for data storage. In today’s drives, the north and south poles of the magnetic particles run parallel to the disc but in the new method they are arranged perpendicular to the disc, as the name suggests.

“The result of this new arrangement is that each particle occupies a smaller area of the disk’s surface and so more particles can be crammed onto the disk. This is measured as the areal density and today’s most advanced drives can store between 100 gigabits and 120 gigabits of data in a square inch of disk space.”

Hitachi has started testing sample ‘perpendicular’ drives and says the technology could allow for 1TB desktop drives or 20GB Microdrives in 2007, adds PC World.

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See:-
New York Times - New technology for disk drives, p2pnet, April 4, 2004
PC World – Hitachi Eyes 1TB Desktop Drives, April 4, 2005

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