October 15th, 2007 by ketyung
Hitachi has got some good news for us, which they claim they managed to develop the world’s smallest read-head technology for hard drive. This super tiny read-head technology will give a storage capacity boost for both desktop and laptop computers. This new read-head technology is expected to quadruple current storage capacity limits, which allows desktop computers to have a whopping 4TB of hard drives and 1TB for the notebooks.
Researches at Hitachi managed to reduce the existing recording head by more than a factor of two. The new read-head is capable of reading in the 30-50 nanometer (nm) range, which is up to 2,000 times smaller than the width of an average human hair (approx. 70-100 microns). This new read head technology is dubbed as current perpendicular-to-the-plane giant magnetoresistive head or in short CPP-GMR. It’s expected to see this technology to be implemented in Hitachi’s shipping products in 2009 and reach its full potential in 2011.
Currently, there are still few obstacles in front that Hitachi need to look into in order for this technology to be incorporated into today’s computers. Such as, although the CPP-GMR produces much lower electrical resistance and noise compared to common TMR hard drives (Hard drives that use Hitachi’s existing head technology), but it produces lower smaller output signal. The ideal case will be low electrical resistance and noise but with high signal output. That is what Hitachi needs to resolve before CPP-GMR technology becomes practical.
More details on Hitachi’s Press Release
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Technorati Tags: Hitachi hard drive, CPP-GMR, smaller hard drive read-head, 4TB hard drive, hard drive
Stumble it!
October 18th, 2007 at 3:53 am
[...] We certainly have to thank all the hard drive manufacturers for their aggressiveness of finding ways to produce higher storage capacity for hard drives. After Hitachi announced that they could achieve 4TB by 2011, and Western Digital is another player that also has little success to show us here. Western Digital has just announced that they have successfully crammed 520GB into one square inch area, which this is double of today’s max of 200GB per square inch of hard drive density. Having this technology allows them to produce a whopping 3TB 3.5-inch drives by 2010. So, they will be one year ahead of Hitachi but only having 1TB less. [...]