Hitachi Predicts 3D Hard Disks by Year's End

Posted by timothy on Sunday April 3, 2005 @10:22PM from the denser-better dept.

daria42 writes "Hitachi has announced that its perpendicular, or 3D, hard disks should be out by the end of 2005." From the article: "Today, hard drives record and store data in a longitudinal fashion, with the read/write heads scanning over a horizontal plane. In perpendicular recording, data bits are aligned vertically, allowing for more data to be squeezed into a finite area. Put another way, data will go from being stored on a two-dimensional XY grid to living in a three-dimensional XYZ space."

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Re:Not to be pedantic.. by stevelinton · 2005-04-03 22:49 · Score: 1, Offtopic

I'm not sure, but I don't think so. I think that instead of using "magnetic fields pointing left or right (or forwards or backwards)" for 1 or 0, they will use "magnetic fields pointing up or down". Why does this make a difference, I hear you yell -- because the magnetic crystals are needle-shaped and the magnetic field points along the needle, so up/down packs them in more tightly.