Researchers are working on technology that could offer seven times as much storage.
Researchers in Japan have reported success in an advanced data-storage technology that could help yield hard drives with capacities of seven times or more than today"s most advanced drives in as soon as five years.
Their work is a refinement of perpendicular storage technology, a method of data storage that is only just beginning to come into commercial use in hard drives. Drive makers are switching to perpendicular storage because it allows much more data to be stored on a disk. This is because the magnetic particles on which data is stored stand perpendicular to the disk"s surface and so more of them can be packed onto the disk than in the current longitudinal recording method in which they lay flat.