Dec 20, 2010 14:27 GMT  ·  By

When it comes to platter density, Hitachi is one manufacturer that is at least a step above all others, the company's sixth generation perpendicular magnetic recording technology enabling it to produce HDD platters with up to 1GB of storage capacity, making possible the development of 4TB and 5TB hard disks.

Just last week Hitachi announced the availability of their 7mm thick Travelstar Z5K500 2.5-inch hard disk drive, their very first HDD built using the company's sixth generation perpendicular magnetic recording technology.

And while others were busy praising the drive for its minute size, X-bit Labs was quick to calculate how this could affect the storage capacity of Hitachi's future storage units.

As it turns out, the Z5K500 is based on a single 500GB sixth-generation PMR platter with 636Gb/inch2 areal density, enabling the Japanese company to develop 2.5" drives 1TB or 1.5TB in capacity, by installing together two or three such platters.

While this is a truly impressive feat, when using the same areal density for determining the storage space available on a 3.5-inch unit, the publication was quick to point out this could mean that Hitachi would be able to build platters with a capacity of about 1TB.

Thanks to this advancement, 4TB drives could become possible sometime during the next 12 months, just as analysts have previously suggested.

Furthermore, 5TB HDDs are also an option as Hitachi is one of the few companies that develop five platter mechanical storage drives.

The Travelstar Z5K family of hard drives offers 500GB, 320GB, 250GB capacities, 5400rpm spindle speed, 8MB cache buffer, Serial ATA-300 interface as well as 5.5ms average latency and 13ms average read seek time

Unfortunately, although the technology would allow for such HDDs to be build, Hitachi remained silent in this regard, choosing not to disclose any information about its future plans.