Hitachi took advantage of the Magnetic Recording Conference which was taking place from July 29-31 in Singapore to show the technical feasibility of platters with a density of 610 Gbit/inch² (or 76.25 GB/inch²) for PMR (Perpendicular Magnetic Recording) hard drives. This is thanks to a spacing of only 65nm between media tracks and between recording heads.Moreover, a new technique for processing the signal was introduced which enables doing away with (instead of adding as can sometimes be the case) Reed-Solomon error correction code which has been used up until now. The result is a gain in space occupied by the code that increases the available density to 635 Gbit/inch².
Clearly this allows multiplying the capacity of the current generation of 2.5 hard drives; however, unfortunately Hitachi does not tell us the exact date of availability. On the other hand, they do remind us of their showing the feasibility of 230 Gbit/inch² in Aprill 2005 and that of 345 Gbit/inch² in September 2006 which represents an annual progression of roughly 40%. Now we will just have to see when the limits of PMR which functions with 1000 Gbit/inch² will be attained...
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