Hard disk drives get bigger

Researchers of Toshiba and Tohoku universities are developing a technology known as Nanocontact Magnetic Resistance (NC-MR) which will help them build 5 terabyte (one terabyte is 1,000 gigabytes) hard drives in about six years. The technology is meant to increase magnetic resonance of drive heads to enable them to store a large amount of data in a small space. This means that hard drives will get smaller and ‘larger' at the same time. Two weeks ago, Hitachi had released its ‘colossal' 1TB deskstar hard drive. Seagate has also come out with 750GB (Barracuda 7200.10 Serial ATA) Hard Drive. To make the hard drives bigger, both Hitachi and Seagate used perpendicular recording techniques. This means that data is stored vertically using every bit of space available. NC-MR technology is expected to make it easier still.