History of Computers - The Terabyte Hard Drive

In 2006 one of Hitachi's hard disk testing labs began testing perpendicular magnetic recording. What they found led them down the path to much larger hard drives then anyone had ever seen, specifically the first terabyte hard drive in early 2007.

Inside the Hard Drive

Overview

A hard drive reads and records information off of stacked disks called platters. The way information is stored is a magnetic charge is either put in or read from the metal disks. This allows the data to stay present on the hard drive even when a computer is off. The size of the hard drive depends on the amount of particles (measured in bits per square inch or areal density) that can be magnetized. Until now the platters have used longitudinal magnetic recording (LMR). Hitachi has been thoroughly investigating the advantages of perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) since 2006. The benefits are huge. Imagine lining up dominoes side by side flat on a table. Now if you stand them all up on the edge you can fit a whole lot more in a lot less space. This is the difference between LMR and PMR. It has allowed them to raise the areal density in each of their platter to the point where a 3.5 inch hard drive could hold a whole terabyte or 1000 gigabytes of data.

Also, terabyte external hard drives are becoming common. A two terabyte external hard drive can be found on the shelf in Best Buy. With this increased storage space, many people can now back up their entire hard drive on an external drive along with anything else they would like to store but delete from their computer because they take up too much space, like movies or old files.

Significance

The terabyte hard drive and the discovery of PMR now allows people to gain access to a massive disk space. At this rate user's may never have to delete data or programs ever again. With terabyte drives becoming just shy of default, the possibilities for future hard drives are endless. Toshiba is planning on releasing a 2 terabyte hard drive in 2009, and they also believe that with the success of the terabyte hard drive, by 2016 a behemoth 25 terabyte 3.5 inch hard drive is possible. In March of 2018, Nimbus Data released a 100TB SSD. All this space was packed into a 3.5-inch hard drive. This technology has revolutionized computer storage and will pave the way for unimaginably large hard drives in the future.

External Links

http://current.com/items/89088208_hitatchi_make_2nd_gen_terabyte_hard_drive

http://www.pcworld.com/article/124925/a_faster_denser_hard_drive_debuts.html

http://www.photographyblog.com/index.php/weblog/comments/hitachi_1_terabyte_hard_drive_in_2007/

References

Page Creator: Bowden Kelly