Hard drive builder Seagate will release a 2.5-inch notebook PC drive with 160GB of capacity in the first quarter of next year, the company has announced at a news conference in Tokyo.
The extra storage for the 160GB drive is achieved through a new technology called perpendicular recording, according to Tsuyoshi Kobayashi, vice president of Nippon Seagate. Seagate's drive looks to be the first 2.5-inch drive with this capacity using perpendicular recording technology to hit the market.
Perpendicular technology is being introduced by most of the world's major hard drive vendors and promises a series of big capacity boosts in the coming years for drives used in servers, PCs, notebooks, and portable devices, the vendors say.
It works by standing the magnetic fields that represent data bits upright. In today's commercially available drives, those fields lay flat on the disk surface. Standing them upright means they take less space, enabling more to be packed on the disk.
For notebooks, two companies have so far said they plan to use the technology with 2.5-inch drives. Hitachi Global Storage Technologies is field-testing 100GB drives, but has yet to announce it is shipping them. In April, Fujitsu said it planned to sell 200GB drives using perpendicular technology, but not until 2007.
Seagate also released a series of other products aimed at taking advantage of personal video recorders and other devices that day, including hard drives for the automotive market, a 2.5-inch drive for DVRs and game consoles, and a 8GB drive for portable media players. Seagate also introduced new 500GB drives and the first drives with Full Disc Encryption.
