Fujitsu marching towards terabyte hard drives for notebooks

Sunnyvale (CA) – Fujitsu announced that it has developed a basic read/write capability of ideally ordered alumina nanoholes on a 2.5” magnetic disk on the way to achieve a recording density of 1 Tb per square inch.

According to a press release, Fujitsu claims to be first to have created an ordered alumina nanohole patterns, including a flying head on a rotating disk. The fabrication process uses perpendicular magnetic recording at a density of 100 nm pitch nanoholes, which is supported currently available head technology, the company said. The pitch is significantly wider than the 25 nm pitch that was announced by the company earlier this year and that is expected to be necessary to achieve a recording density of 1 Tb per square inch.

“Fujitsu is the first company to demonstrate read/write signals in individual ideally ordered alumina nanohole using a flying head for measurement," said David James, vice president, advanced product engineering, Fujitsu Computer Products of America, in a prepared statement. With the growing demand for hard drives with high capacities, especially in small form factors, one Tb per square inch would enable potential storage capacities of up to 1.2 TB on a 2-platter 2.5" drive. We expect this breakthrough to provide revolutionary changes for various IT and consumer applications.”

Fujitsu did not say when this technology will be available, however, it could provide the industry enough headroom for one more decade before the looming switch to a completely new hard drive technology may be necessary. Currently mass produced hard drives achieve densities of up to 205 Gb per square inch in Seagate’s single-platter 3.5" desktop drive. Samsung recently announced a 3-platter 1 TB drive which records data at 241 Gb per square inch. At the time 1 Tb per square inch will be reached, 3.5" drives, could record data at 1.33 TB per platter and translate into 4-disk drives with more than 5 TB capacity.