news.com.com — [Toshiba] is coming out with a 2.5-inch drive for notebooks later this year with platters that hold 178.8 gigabits per square inch, which will likely be a record when the drive hits shelves. The current record for areal density for a commercially released drive is 133 gigabits per square inch.
Jun 5, 2006 View in Crawl 4
jbondJun 5, 2006
Where's the perpendicular 1.8" drives? 60Gb in my portable music/video player isn't enough.
Closed AccountJun 5, 2006
Actually, it WOULD help you. The way our warranty works is that if we fail to fix the problem 3 times, you get a refund. Or if you have accidental coverage, you can just drop it down the stairs :D. But then you will most likely get a replacement. And I'm not saying it because I want to scam people. I'm quitting this job soon so I don't care if someone buys the warranty or not :)
jtownJun 5, 2006
Haven't been around long, have you? When the first consumer hard drives hit the market, they were incredibly fragile. Not to mention expensive. When that hard drive was spinning, woe to the person who bumped the desk. And jebus help you if you forgot to park the heads before turning off the machine. And you didn't turn those things on and off without good reason. Ever wonder why old-timers often prefer to leave their equipment powerd on 24/7? The shock of turning on a drive along with the expansion and contraction caused by temperature changes killed more hard drives than you can imagine. Today, we have our drives set to spin down after 20-30 minutes. ipods and other hard drive based MP3 players spin the drives up and down several times a minute. The idea of doing that to a drive 15-20 years ago would have been ludicrous. It wouldn't have lasted a month like that.
dwatchJun 5, 2006
@shucklakPerpendicular recording technology is fairly new, only developed in the last year or so. It has nothing to do with the rotational speed of the platters. 5400RPM drives have been around for more than a decade. Basically, its a different arrangement of magnetic poles on the drive that increases how much you can store. Imagine the data on a hard drives is made up of individual magnets lying on a disk. The on/off state determined by the north or south pole of the magnet being read by the drive's head as the disk rotates under it. The old method has the magnets lying flat on a disk, with their north and south pole pointing left to right. With the new perpendicular technology, you have magnets standing up on their end, with the north and south poles pointing up and down. That means you can group the magnets closer together in the same space (higher density) and still read their on/off states (ones and zeros to a computer). This has allowed manufacturers to fit more data on the same sized platters. The reason this is a big breakthrough is, the old method ran up against physical limits on how small the "magnet" could be on the drive. Any smaller than a certain size, and the spot will not hold its magnetic state. This allows you to have the same sized 'magnets', yet group them tighter together.
nsresponderJun 5, 2006
Two words: Transfer rate.-jcr
noobaliciousJun 5, 2006
Story reported as innacurate. Seagate holds the record, which is higher than this at 188GB per platter. And it's already on the market. Seagate 7200.10 750GB drive with 188GB per platter. Benchmarks/Tech Data here:<a class="user" href="http://techreport.com/reviews/2006q2/barracuda-7200.10/index.x?pg=1">http://techreport.com/reviews/2006q2/barracuda-7200.10/index.x?pg=1</a>