Hard Disk Drive to get smaller in size, with bigger storage and cheaper?
Hitachi's new technology breakthrough unlocks the 1 tb limit...

A single hard drive with four terabytes of storage (4TB) could be a reality by 2011, thanks to a nanotechnology breakthrough by Japanese firm Hitachi.

The company has successfully managed to shrink the read-write head of a hard drive to two thousand times smaller than the width of a human hair.

The smaller head can read greater densities of data stored on the disk.

Hitachi said the advance would fuel the "terabyte era", with a 4TB drive able to hold more than a million songs.

Hard drives store data by magnetising the surface of the disk in a pattern which represents the data in digital form.

The data is stored digitally as tiny magnetized regions, called bits, on the disk. A magnetic orientation in one direction on the disk could represent a "1", while an orientation in the opposite direction could represent a "0".

Read all about it here, courtesy of news.bbc.co.uk

Eric