Showa Denko, a Japan-based major supplier of hard disk media announced that it will begin mass production of 2.5" hard drive platters with a capacity of 100 GB each in the third quarter of this year. Showa Denko is currently the only hard drive media manufacturer that has confirmed a capability to produce such devices.

The 2.5" platters will be using perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) technology to achieve a density of 178 Gb/square inch. Showa Denko's customer includes hard drive manufacturers such as Toshiba, Western Digital as well as other smaller drive manufacturers that do not have the capacity to develop their own platters, such as Seagate and Hitachi GST.

Showa Denko said that it expects the platters to be built into 2.5" hard drives offering a capacity of 200 GB. Toshiba is currently the only company that has announced that it will be offering hard drives with that capacity. According to a press release issued earlier this month, Toshiba will begin selling its 200 GB MK2035GSS drive in August.

Showa Denko's currently contructed hard drive media plant in Singapore

In a response to a TG Daily inquiry, Toshiba declined to confirm that it is using Showa Denko's platters. However, the fact that Showa Denko is currently the only company offering that capacity and Toshiba is the only company to have announced a drive with using platters with that capacity, we would assume that the MK2035GSS's platters are built in a Showa Denko facility.

Showa Denko apparently is also one of the more unknown names to profit from the current boom in the storage industry. In May of this year, the company had announced an increase in production capacity to a total of 13.75 million disks per month. Today the firm said that it will increase its capacity by another two million disks per month to a total of 15.75 million platters by the end of this year.