Hitachi Global Storage brings a new revolution in Data Storage Capacities

Hitachi Global Storage brings a new revolution in Data Storage Capacities

If we are to believe the Hitachi Global Storage company, we would soon have 2.5cm-diameter hard drives with 20GB storage capacity available commercially in the market. They have come out with a technology, which can lead to hard drives with 4.5GB capacity per square centimeter. In simple terms, Apple iPod Mini can now easily have capacities in excess of around 20 Gigs using Hitachi’s concepts. They have announced to release such drives commercially by the year 2007.

Current generation of hard drives store data in a longitudinal fashion, with the read and write heads scanning over a horizontal plane while the new technology from the storage giant uses perpendicular recording technology. Data bits are aligned vertically which leads to more storage capacity over a smaller area.

They would be releasing some drives using this technology later this year with marginally increased capacities compared to current market standards. The denser versions with more date storage capabilities would take a bit more time. This technology would enable Hitachi to release drives with storage capacities of one Terabyte for the desktop computers. In the following years, the company expects to reach the capabilities where they would be able to provide micro drives with 60GB of storage capacity.

Hitachi is currently testing the technology amongst a private group of employees and customers to see how they perform in the real world scenarios. They have got competition from the big names like Seagate and Toshiba who are also working on similar technologies and would be competing to be the first one to launch their products based on these latest technologies.