Friday, August 19th, 2005, 3:46 am
40 GB per Platter
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It’s coming! The perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) hard-drive has been released by Toshiba for the first time. This 1.8 inch hard-drive takes us closer to the vision of huge capacity concentrated within a tiny space. As storage barriers are breached, not only laptops, but also handheld devices begin to challenge the desktop. This condensation of storage is particularly valuable for miniscule devices such as PDA‘s.
The disk stores 40GB in a single platter, and there are plans to release a 80GB version later this year
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Toshiba is currently shipping the 40GB MK4007GAL to OEM and channel partners. The company plans to apply PMR technology to its 0.85-inch HDD in 2006, increasing capacity to 6GB-8GB per platter.
With many modern machines, the large numbers of platters relies on physical space being available. This enables manufacturers to sell hard-drive that reach hundreds of gigabytes (soon terabytes) in capacity. Expect PDA’s to contain a much greater amount of space soon, which is a pre-requisite to using them as hard-drives on full-sized PC‘s. Portable devices such as the Palm LifeDrive should be able to increase ten-fold in terms of capacity. This will probably happen some time in the near future when they equate to the capacity of the iPod (up to 60GB), for instance.
Cited by: PalmAddict
