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Did Toshiba just break the record for HDD areal density?

By Kenny Yeo - on 4 Feb 2015, 9:59am

Did Toshiba just break the record for HDD areal density?

Toshiba's new 3TB Canvio Basic portable external hard disk drive.

At last month's CES 2015, Toshiba announced a new portable external hard disk which offered a whopping 3TB of capacity - the Canvio Basic. It achieves its 3TB capacity by using four 750GB platters- older Toshiba portable external hard disk drives used 500GB platters.

This is significant because 500GB platters have an areal density of 744Gb per square inch (Gbpsi), whereas the new 750GB platters have an areal density of 1100Gbpsi, breaking the 1Tbpsi barrier.

For the past few years, HDD areal density growth have been languishing as low as 15%, so this increase in areal density is particularly important. 1100Gbpsi would mean an increase of over 33% over the previous limit of 826Gbpsi.

Furthermore, Toshiba's announcement also suggests that this was achieved using pure perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) with no shingled magnetic recording (SMR). If true, this would possibly represent the zenith of what is technologically possible with PMR technology.

Extrapolating further, this technology could allow notebooks to have over 2TB of storage in future and also allow for 3.5-inch hard disk drives of over 10TB.

Now who says there's no innovation on the mechanical hard disk drive front?

Source: Forbes

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