Hitachi breaking the speed limit at 3 Gigabits a Second!

I have used Hitachi drives in my computers for as long as I can remember so it did not surprise me to learn that Hitachi could take credit for being the first hard drive to reach 500 GB in storage, as well as being one of the first to use the new SATA II interface. But at 500GB we may soon be reaching our limit using the current longitudinal recording technology. Experts predict that by 2006 we will reach that limit at 1 terabytes around the year 2006.

Longitudinal Recording

As was mention at the beginning of the review as demand continues for increased capacity due to the demands of the music and video users the will probably be forced to turn to newer technology and that very well may be perpendicular recording technology brought out by Toshiba. Whereas in Longitudinal Recording technology the recording media is aligned in a north and south pattern with the center of the drive with Perpendicular Recording the poles are arranged perpendicular to the disk's surface.

Either way you look at it a change is a few years down the road and if you are need of more storage now is a good time to buy since the "Price to Gigabyte" ratio has never been lower. Hitachi's 7K500 drive is available in two versions, by shopping around on the Internet I was able to find the parallel ATA interface version which has an 8MB data buffer for $480.00. Or you can get the 3-gigabits-per-second Serial ATA II interface $430.00 dollar version which is backwards compatible with the 1.5 gigabits-per-second Serial ATA interface. If you're wondering just how much more capacity Hitachi will be able to squeeze out of their current technology before they are forced to change to something different. According to the experts since Hitachi uses longitudinal recording which writes data tracks in concentric circles using particles magnetized horizontally on the surface of the disk.

They seem to think hard drive vendors may be able to to eek out 250GB per platter using longitudinal recording the current drive fit on average somewhere between 100GB to 133GB per platter. They also expect desktop drives to reach maximum capacity of 1 terabyte by late 2006 before running into problems of maintaining data stability.

Perpendicular Recording

Some drive makers have already made the switch over to Perpendicular Recording with experts expecting they will begin to appear as a regular item on most desktops in early 2007 plus the good news for the common user is there will be no need for a special adapter card or motherboard change to operate these drives either.