Seagate has announced its first 3.5-inch disk drives using perpendicular storage technology, which it hopes will break through the storage limitations that are beginning to impact hard-drive technology.

The three new drives join Seagate's existing Cheetah line of disks, which are among the fastest in the industry for data transfer rates.

With a transfer rate of 73mbps to 125mbps, the Cheetah 15K.5 transfers data about 30 percent faster than the Cheetah 15K.4, which does not use perpendicular technology.

The Cheetah 15K.5 will be available in three models, each offering a different storage capacity: a 300GB model with four platters; a 147GB model with two platters and a 73GB model with a single platter.


Hitachi Global Storage Technologies
Perpendicular Recording
Hitachi achieves industry-leading areal densities via Perpendicular Recording
SUPERPARA-MAGNETIC-EFFECT

In March 2005, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies demonstrated an areal density of 230 gigabits per square inch (Gb/in2) on perpendicular recording technology, the highest areal density achieved to date based on vertical recording. This accomplishment represents a doubling of today’s highest data densities on longitudinal recording technology. At the current rate of growth, Hitachi expects to see products shipping at 230 Gb/in2 in 2007, translating into storage capacities of up to 20 gigabytes* on Hitachi’s one-inch Microdrive and up to one terabyte on the Hitachi 3.5-inch Deskstar hard drive.

SUPERPARA-MAGNETIC-EFFECT

Toshiba's new 1.8-inch 40GB perpendicular drive
eagate may have been the first to announce theirs, but the winner of the race to get the first perpendicular recording hard drive (can we just call them perpendiskulars?) to market goes to Toshiba. The MK4007GAL does 40GB on a single platter, which means thinner portable audio players with fewer read/write heads (and thus fewer points of failure). Their new Gigabeat F41 will apparently use the new perpdrive, and they've plans to release an 80GB version, the MK8007GAH, later this year.

I love the concept I must say.

I don't mind them making 10" HDDs as long as they hold 20PB, spins at 20kRPM, quiet as a mouse, cool as a cucumber, etc.

But if they can do that and fit it in a 3.5" HDD, its great

thats really cool. it had looked for a while as though HDD size expansion was slowing down. But perhaps this little perpdisk will keep things expanding for a little longer.

Now the only problem is that they'll have to create new data recovery tools.

What i want to see is a dynamic storage medium built out of flash memory drives.