Hitachi sets sights on 5 TB drive in 2010
Written by admin on July 4th, 2008 in Gadgets and Devices.
Hitachi Global Storage Technologies is still confident that the standard hard drives of today will be pushing the limits of storage capacity in a couple of years time.
Regardless of how well ssd storage does over the next 18 months, Hitachi has set itself a lofty goal of producing a 3.5 inch hard drive with a storage capacity of 5 TB some time in 2010.
It aims to do this with the help of perpendicular-to-the-plane giant magnetoresistance or CPP-GMR for short. With that technology Hitachi believe they can achieve greater than 1 TB of storage per square inch of the disk.
The goal was put forward by Yoshihiro Shiroishi of Hitachi talking to Nikkei net Interactive (free registration required), where he said:
By 2010, just two disks will suffice to provide the same storage capacity as the human brain.
Read more at TechRadar.com
Matthew’s Opinion
I’m still amazed you can now get 1 TB of storage in a 3.5 inch, but 5 TB within 2 years? That’s just incredible and apparently half the storage capacity of the human brain.
It’s easy to think that such huge storage capacities will never be needed in a desktop machine, but file sizes and the amount of files products ship with continues to increase. Just look at games and how many gigabytes of data they now need. Stick Crysis, Call of Duty 4, BioShock, Mass Effect and World of Warcraft on your machine and that’s well over 10 GB already gone.
On top of that we have ever-increasing amounts of rich media to download from the Internet, digital pictures in their thousands and digital video recorders getting cheaper and easier to use – just look at our Flip Mino review for the latest example of that.
Our need for storage grows every year and therefore the storage companies need to keep pushing the boundaries. The phyiscal limits of what can be achieved with today’s hard drives must be close, however, so we can expect to see some novel new technology starting to appear as well before too long.
Tags: home cinema, digital, laptops, robots
