Nearly all of hard drive maker Seagate Technology"s products will use perpendicular recording technology by the end of 2006, the company"s chief financial officer says. Perpendicular recording promises big capacity boosts for drives used in servers, PCs, notebooks and portable devices. The technology works by standing the magnetic fields that represent data bits upright instead of flat on the surface of the disk as is common with nearly all of today"s drives. Standing the fields upright means they take up less space, enabling more data to be crammed on the disk.
The capacity boosts that Seagate promises will come first on the company"s 2.5-inch disks for notebook PCs and 1-inch disks for portable electronics, and then with 3.5-inch disks for desktop PCs and servers, Charles Pope, the company"s chief financial officer, said in a conference call announcing the company"s year-end financial results. The shift involves just about all the products the company makes, he said. "Over the coming year, the vast majority of products shipping [from Seagate] ... will be using perpendicular technology," he said.