Toshiba touts data density record with new drive

Toshiba says it has earned the right to say it’s more dense than its competitors.

The Japanese electronics giant is coming out with a 2.5-inch drive for notebooks later this year with platters (the silver pancakes in a drive that hold data) that hold 178.8 gigabits per square inch, which will likely be a record when the drive hits shelves. The current record for areal density for a commercially released drive is 133 gigabits per square inch, according to Toshiba.

“It is the highest for any drive anytime, anywhere,” said Maciek Brzeski, vice president of marketing for Toshiba’s Storage Device Division. Brzeski added that it’s unlikely competitors will come out with something more dense in the near future.

The notebook drive, the MK2035GSS, has a capacity of 200GB of data, 25 percent more than the 160GB drives touted by Seagate and Hitachi. (Drives get measured in bytes, while memory chips and platters are discussed in terms of bits. Eight bits equal a byte.)

The increase in capacity comes from a couple of different engineering tweaks. The drive combines perpendicular data storage platters. Perpendicular platters store data in vertical columns and thus can hold more data than traditional longitudinal platters.

Additionally, the new drive comes with so-called tunnel magneto-resistive (TMR) recording head technology, rather than giant magneto-resistive (GMR) recording head technology. To date, Toshiba has released perpendicular drives with GMR heads and longitudinal drives with TMR heads, but not a perpendicular TMR drive.

Full article: CNET News.com