Tiny drives set for space boost (one inch hard-drive holding 60Gb)

[RedEarth]

Hard drives for mobiles and other portable gadgets could store up to a terabyte of data in the next few years, using a century-old recording process. Hitachi has said it can fit 230 gigabits of data per square inch on a disk using "perpendicular recording"



The storage industry currently makes hard drives using longitudinal recording, which is reaching its limit.

Hitachi's work means we could see one-inch hard drives holding 60Gb instead of up to 10Gb currently.

One terabyte is the equivalent of 1,000Gb - enough to hold 240,000 songs at the standard encoding rate for digital music files.

Perpendicular recording was pioneered by the late 19th century work of Danish scientist Valdemar Poulsen, who demonstrated magnetic recording with his telegraphone.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4411649.stm

[punpirate]

1. Technology marches on....

I was pretty amazed to see, ten years ago, a 40 meg HD out of an F-15 that was about 3/32" thick and with a footprint a little bigger than half a credit card.