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Approaching Hard Drive Limits?

August 4, 2010 16:30:20.506

Samsung has announced a new drive that's pretty close to what the current limits of magnetic drive tech can do:

Samsung announced new hard drives today that feature an aereal density that was questioned just four years ago and we are now approaching densities that are believed to be the limit for the current recording technology. Is it finally time to ditch traditional magnetic recording methods and transition to heat assisted recording?

From the consumer end, these don't look new - they are shipping 1.5 tb and 2.0 tb drives. But:

However, the 2.0 TB model now includes only 3 disks instead of four, which means that the storage capacity has been increased by 33% to 667 GB.

I wonder whether SSD drives will ramp up to the point where these physical limitations don't really matter, or whether there's still life in the classic spinning disk...

posted by James Robertson

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