Hitachi drives utilize magnetism to read and write data to
their drives. Their breakthrough technology for the new recording head is
called “current perpendicular-to-the-plane giant magneto-resistive (CPP-GMR).”
On Monday, this new technology was unveiled during the 8thPerpendicular
Magnetic Recording Conferencewhile at the Tokyo International Forum in Japan.
Hitachi will accomplish this by reducing the recording head
size of the hard drives. Some of you might not understand completely how this
works: if you compare the size of a big Sharpie marker to a freshly sharpened
pencil, you quickly realize that the marker will take up a much bigger area
when compared to a pencil while writing. This would mean that the new pencil
(recording head) has an ultra-fine tip, and this results in allowing the
writing and reading of more data on the same surface area.
The risk for data failure is potentially higher than with
drives available today. If any of you have had the painful experience of a HDD
failure, then you would quickly realize why this could be a double-edged sword.
The good coming from all this is that other companies like Western Digital and
Seagate are likely to develop new technologies to rival that of Hitachi, and
will drive prices down further in the future.
The bottom line: this is good for consumers in the future,
and for driving down the prices of current hard drives.
