Hard drives could experience a massive increase in capacity next year now that at least one "major" HDD maker has placed an order for equipment to mass-produce 'patterned media' drives. Earlier this week, Malmö, Sweden-based fabrication-equipment maker Obducat announced it had reached an agreement with "a major player in HDD the industry" to supply the unnamed company with up to SKR66m ($11.13m) worth of lithography hardware.
Obducat will provide the mystery vendor with at a "production-ready" Sindre lithography machine, used to create the high data-density surfaces used by the new drive technology. More equipment orders may follow, the Swedish firm said. A possible candidate for the HDD maker behind the Obducat deal is Fujitsu, which has been working on patterned media technology since 2005. Canon was working on the technology in the early years of the decade and continues to do so, but it's not a major hard drive maker.
View: The full story @ The Reg
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