John Best, chief technologist at the San Jose, California-based company that was formerly IBM’s HDD arm, said longitudinal recording is currently the norm in hard disk technology, but that it is fast maxing out.
We achieve greater aerial densities by miniaturizing, but at a certain point the electrical charge required to power a write becomes so small that atmospheric interference becomes a problem, he said.
Hitachi has plumped for perpendicular recording as the answer, since it will enable higher storage capacities from the outset, as well as offering a roadmap for at least ten years with further technology enhancements.
We should see annual capacity increases of between 20% and 40% during that period, said Best.
He added that technologies such as patterned media (whereby patterns are embossed on substrates) and thermally-assisted recording (whereby bit sizes can be reduced still further through heating them, enabling them to be written to while thermally magnetized) will be brought into play around the end of this decade to extend the capacity increases of perpendicular recording. Where perpendicular will initially enable 150GB per square inch, these two enhancements jointly could take that figure to 1Tb.
The choice of the 2.5-inch format as the first place on which to deploy the new recording technology relates to the markets where Hitachi sees it being of most relevance in the short term: consumer devices, on which large audio and video files will be stored, as well as laptops. Thereafter, however, it will be rolled out to the rest of the portfolio.
In the 3.5-inch format, for instance, which is positioned increasingly as a capacity product with 2.5-inch providing performance, it could enable even larger boxes of disks for nearline storage. In smaller formats such as 1.8-inch and 1-inch, it could start driving serious capacity points into mobile devices. Hitachi sees a 60GB one-inch drive as achievable shortly after it launches the 2.5-inch drive.
In the more immediate version, Hitachi plans a slim-line version of its Travelstar 1.8-inch drive, which is already going into mobile devices and some compact laptops. The Travelstar slim, shipping in August, will have a capacity of 30GB-40GB and a form factor making it easier to fit inside mobile devices. Then by the end of the year Hitachi launches the next version of its 1-inch microdrive, the Mikey, taking the capacity from the current 6GB to 8GB-10GB.
These low-end devices haven’t made it into phones per se as yet, but they already feature in PDAs. The existing 1.8-inch Travelstar is in the PMA400, a PDA with WiFi from France’s Archos SA, while the 6GB predecessor to Mikey is featured in the Zaurus PDA from Japanese manufacturer Sharp.
