Maxtor and Friends Shoot for 144 PetaByte HDDs

Just last week, Maxtor unveiled a hard drive that could hold a whopping 100GB . Now, the company is saying that, along with Compaq, Microsoft, VIA Technologies, and others, they will support the industry's next interface standard to break the 137GB barrier for ATA hard drives. This new standard allows the creation of ATA hard drives that can access more than 100,000 times more data than the current 137GB interface standard. The "Big Drive" interface initiative breaks the 137GB barrier with an upgraded ATA interface that allows for up to 48 bits of address space on a single drive, increasing the maximum capacity of an ATA drive to 144PB (PetaByte = 1,024 teraBytes). To get more information about the "Big Drive" Initiative check out the group's website . If you want to read a more technical account about how Maxtor and its pals intend to break the current HDD size barrier, Maxtor has posted a whitepaper you can access from the site (it doesn't have an individual URL to link to) that gets down to the nitty gritty.