The Hindu : National : Jumbo disks will stack 'em up-and-down

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Sunday, Jun 12, 2005

National

National

Jumbo disks will stack 'em up-and-down

Anand Parthasarathy

It's going to be a vertical world soon in the storage business

BANGALORE: Storing data flat, on a hard disk drive is so `yesterday.' If you want to cram in the gigabytes tighter than ever before, the way to go is up-and-down. Come to think of it, not very different from replacing single storey homes with vertical tower blocks. U.S. based hard drive leader Seagate has just announced that its next "Momentus" storage device due by early 2006 will boost the capacity for notebook drives to 160 gigabytes (GB) — that's 160 billion chunks of information — and all on a platter just 2.5 inch ( 6 cm ) in diameter.

Typical portable computer storage today is 40 GB. Seagate developers have achieved this by changing the way data is currently stored on hard disks now — by aligning the north and south poles of millions of tiny magnetic fields in a flat horizontal plane. The new high density jumbo disk will polarize the data up and down stacking it vertically along the thickness of the disk.

This change is expected to increase the storage capacity fourfold and Seagate may soon be joined by other drive makers like Toshiba, who have already tried out the so called "perpendicular storage" technology, albeit for much smaller capacities.

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