Hitachis new tech promises 4 TB drives

Tokyo (Japan) – An innovation in hard drive technology could push future drive capacities to 4 TB. Hitachi claims it can shrink the GMR (giant magnetoresistance) heads currently used in reading hard drive platters and achieve a four-fold increase in capacity. The company will present its research at the upcoming Perpendicular Magnetic Recording conference in Tokyo.

The new technology could begin appearing in 2009 and could boost future desktop drive capacities to 4 terabytes and laptop drives to 1 terabyte by 2011. Hitachi claims it will be able to manufacture new GMR heads that are just 30 to 50 nanometers wide. The shrink is made possible with new materials that are more sensitive to magnetic variations on the platters and is called current perpendicular-to-the-plane GMR or CPP-GMR.

Hitachi hopes the technology will shrink the distance between data bits on the hard drive platter and theoretically increase capacity to 500 gigabits per square inch.

GMR head technology has allowed hard drive capacities to grow tremendously in the past few years. Today it’s not unusual to see laptops with drives of 100 GB or more and desktops with at least 500 GB of hard drive space. The GMR effect was discovered in 1988 by French and German scientists Albert Fert and Peter Grunberg. Both recently won a Nobel Physics Prize for their work.