4 terabytes hard drive for desktops, 1 terabyte for laptops by 2011

Hitachi will soon launch hard drives that are nanoscale in size smaller than the width of the hair. The newer hard drive will quadruple current storage limits to 4 terabytes for desktop computers and 1 terabyte for laptops by the year 2011.

Current computers have a maximum 1 Terabyte (1024 Gigabytes), but with Hitachi’s new hard drive technology, the computers in 2011 will have a capacity as high as 4 terabytes, enough to store 1 million books, 250 hours of high definition video or a quarter million songs. In a laptop you can hold 62,500 songs and have a jukebox of your entire collection and more.

Hitachi say the increased space is possible because its researchers have shrunken a key component in hard drives to a nanoscale. Thus it has created the world’s smallest disk drive heads in the 30 nanometer to 50 nanometer ranger about 2,000 times smaller than the width of an average human hair. It will be like a wafer thin hard drive.

A hard drive has a metal disk inside that spins as an arm with an electromagnetic head at its tip hovers over it. The head reads bits of data by registering the magnetic bearing of the particles on the disk.

The smaller hard drives will help the computers to become thinner, consume less energy, make computers and laptops lighter and require less cooling.

The technology uses a well known one called GMR or giant magnetoresistance, which was the basis of the work of two European scientists who won the Nobel Prize in physics last week.

The GMR helped technology in the early 2000s, which made hard drives to double in capacity every year, but the GMR based heads posed a limitation as a result further increase was not possible. The scientists were able to replace this with an entirely different kind of head; as a result they were able to make wafer thin hard drives with improved reader head.

John Best, chief technologist for Hitachi's data-storage unit said to the media:

We changed the direction of the current and adjusted the materials to get good properties,"

Other hard drive companies are also working on similar technology, so we will see a number of competing hard drives in the market all based on this new type of GMR-based technology.

Can’t imagine what one can do with a 4 Terabyte hard drive, maybe we will find a use for it with high definition videos downloads. But first they should increase the broadband speed, it is terrible.