New Hitachi heads promise 4T drives by 2011

Stephen Withers
Tuesday, 16 October 2007 05:12

Business IT - Technology

A new technology for hard disk recording heads is expected to allow the quadrupling of drive capacities within a few years.

Hitachi's current perpendicular to the plane giant magnetoresistive heads are less than half the size of existing designs. The first products using the technology are expected in 2009.

The company currently offers drives with recording densities of around 200G per square inch. The smaller size of the new heads, coupled with their improved signal to noise ratio, means this could be boosted to between 500G and 1T per square inch by reducing track widths from 70nm to 50 and eventually 30nm, company officials said.

"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," said Hiroaki Odawara, research director of the Storage Technology Research Center at Hitachi's Central Research Laboratory.

"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."

The technology was jointly developed by Hitachi's Central Research Laboratory in Japan and Hitachi Global Storage Technologies' San Jose Research Center in the US.