The Global Storage Technologies department of Hitachi (Hitachi GST) is pushing the limits with hard disk technology. Hitachi has developed a new technology that will allow the company to create 4-Terabyte drives that are expected to be put in production in 2011.

Hitachi drives utilize magnetism to read and write data to their drives. Their breakthrough technology for the new recording head is called "current perpendicular-to-the-plane giant magneto-resistive (CPP-GMR)." On Monday, this new technology was unveiled during the 8th Perpendicular Magnetic Recording Conference while at the Tokyo International Forum in Japan.

Hitachi will accomplish this by reducing the recording head size of the hard drives. Some of you might not understand completely how this works: if you compare the size of a big Sharpie marker to a freshly sharpened pencil, you quickly realize that the marker will take up a much bigger area when compared to a pencil while writing. This would mean that the new pencil (recording head) has an ultra-fine tip, and this results in allowing the writing and reading of more data on the same surface area.

The arrow points out the recording head to my Maxtor 20 GB HDD drive. It is considerably larger than the new drives that will be available from Hitachi.
There are some problems as noted on TechNewsWorld:
The problem with shrinking recording heads, however, has been in a relative increase in electrical resistance, which creates noise that makes it hard for the head to correctly read data. Hitachi's CPP-GMR device reduces electrical resistance, according to the company, resulting in lower electrical noise and signals that can still be accurately read by the recording heads.
The risk for data failure is potentially higher than with drives available today. If any of you have had the painful experience of a HDD failure, then you would quickly realize why this could be a double-edged sword. The good coming from all this is that other companies like Western Digital and Seagate are likely to develop new technologies to rival that of Hitachi, and will drive prices down further in the future.

The bottom line: this is good for consumers in the future, and for driving down the prices of current hard drives.

[Source: TechNewsWorld]