June 5, 2006 8:26AM  |
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“This is a significant breakthrough for the hard-drive industry because the longitudinal recording technology has been extended as far as possible,” said John Rydning, research manager at IDC. “It sets the stage for further data capacity increases in 2.5-inch products.”
 Toshiba has announced plans to start selling a 2.5-inch, 200-GB hard drive, effectively raising the bar on storage capacity for laptops.The drive uses a relatively new technology, called perpendicular recording, that stands bits of data on the end of a disk rather than on the flat surface of the media, as with traditional recording technologies. Perpendicular recording provides up to a five-fold increase in storage capacity over earlier magnetic-recording techniques. By allowing more data bits to pass under the drive head in the same amount of time, the new technology also increases data throughput without having to increase the disk’s rotation speed. This performance boost comes without increases in power consumption or heat generation.
Experts say that larger data capacity in small drives is critical at this juncture for breakthroughs in notebook PCs. Toshiba envisions the new drive being used in high-end laptops, including newer models equipped with video-capture boards and those running Windows XP Media Center, said Maciek Brzeski, a marketing executive in the company’s storage drive division. “Toshiba and other companies are bringing out laptops with TV tuners installed, and some have the new high-definition DVD players, which will require a lot more storage capacity, especially for capturing an HD feed,” he said. The new 2.5-inch product, which will be available in August, boosts data capacity to 1.67 times that of Toshiba’s former highest-capacity 2.5-inch drive.
Other manufacturers, including Seagate and Hitachi, are beginning to implement perpendicular recording for small-format drives that will be used in all sorts of electronics, from digital-music players to mobile phones. Seagate recently unveiled a laptop with 160 GB of storage capacity, and followed that up with a monster PC hard drive with 750 GB of storage space that can hold some 25 DVDs, 50 hours of home video, 15,000 songs, 15,000 digital pictures, and 50 computer games — and still have 300 GB of free space left over. “This is a significant breakthrough for the hard-drive industry because the longitudinal recording technology has been extended as far as possible,” said John Rydning, research manager at IDC, in a recent interview. “It sets the stage for further data capacity increases in 2.5-inch products.” |
