The future of hard drive storage appears to be brighter than ever. Seagate Technology said it had demonstrated a magnetic recording density of 421Gb/in2, a so-called world record. The demonstration used perpendicular recording heads and media created with currently available production equipment that validates Seagate's ability to scale the technology for the foreseeable future without major technological changes or capital additions.
Dr. Mark Kryder of Seagate unveiled the findings during his keynote presentation at the IDEMA DISKCON show.
Seagate said it expected capacity ranges from 40GB to 275GB for 1in and 1.8in consumer electronics drives, 500GB for 2.5in notebook drives and nearly 2.5TB for 3.5in desktop and enterprise class drives.
At 2.5TB capacity, a hard drive would be capable of storing 41,650 hours of music, 800,000 digital photographs, 4000 hours of digital video or 1250 video games. Seagate anticipates that solutions at these density levels could begin to emerge in 2009.
For more information, visit www.seagate.com.