Moore's Law says that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit doubles every two years.

According to Wikipedia: "Almost every measure of the capabilities of digital electronic devices is linked to Moore's Law: processing speed, memory capacity, even the resolution of LCD screens and digital cameras."

Toshiba came out with a 1.8 inch hard drive that carries 160 GB which is pretty impressive.

My question is, since they are now getting "353 Megabits per square millimetre (228 gigabits per square inch)", at what point does Moore's law affect hard drive failure?

I'm pretty sure Moore's Law originally referred to the exponential increase in the number of transistors in a CPU.

Keep in mind that you're citing a Wikipedia article.

ahhhh

magnetic platters don't have anything to do with transistor density.

This is almost like saying "when will the drinking age limit in the USA effect hard drive failures"

How small can the magnetic platter get without it breaking down?

If there is an absolute size limit to magnetic platters they will get around this by switching to a different method, such as flash memory. But I'm not sure Moore's law has or will apply to the size of magentic drive platters despite what someone said in the Wiki article.

For one thing they can put more data on a given sized platter as technology progresses, thus increasing the amount of data per platter, without shrinking the drive, or else using a smaller drive and getting the same amount of data on it.

BTW, is Moore's law still applying to processors. Seems like processor speed has stagnated a bit and they are instead getting more performance by improving their design and using more cores.

Moore's Law still applies is not that they cant increase the speed its that they cant get the heat issues and power requierments under control.

There is talk about hard drives aligning 1 atom at time for storage, so without a better understanding of quantum physics than we have now I would say that is the limit...

Yes, Moore's Law is still valid. His law has nothing to do with the speed of the proccesor. It has to do with the number of transitotrs which is still doubleing every couple of years. Case in point there is now multiple cores in the same space instead of one core.

Moore's Law has absolutely nothing to do with hard drives or hard drive failure.