Mar 8, 2011 07:38 GMT  ·  By

Although just about everyone's talking about SSDs nowadays as far as the topic of data storage is concerned, HDD manufacturers are still actively pushing new technologies in this field as well, the later huge breakthrough coming from none other than Samsung.

So, while some of its rivals (such as Western Digital, Seagate, Hitachi, etc.) are involved in a pretty bitter competition (some of them going as far as buying just about every other company around them, as long as it's got anything to do with the field of HDD storage), Samsung has managed to attain quite an impressive achievement, developing HDDs that can hold 1TB of data per platter, according to a report by Chiphell.

This is very important because it opens the path towards large-size storage units, the 3.5-inch HDDs being thus able to hit a whopping 4TB, while the 2.5-inch, dual-platter notebook drives will attain up to 1TB.

As a comparison, the largest 3.5-inch HDDs currently available on the market offer 3TB of storage space, or 750GB per platter, respectively, and they're pretty hard to come-by, anyway, only a couple of companies (well, the three mentioned above, actually) having such products in their current lineups.

While Samsung's not really provided any details regarding the possible time frame when we should expect this large storage units to arrive on the market, they did reveal the fact that, when that moment arrives, the drives will be a part of the company's Spinpoint EcoGreen series, and will thus be able to deliver 5,400RPM rotational speeds, accompanied by 32MB of cache and SATA 6Gbps interfaces.

Last, but certainly not least, it's important to mention that Samsung also hinted that, with a couple of minor modifications, such a technology would ultimately enable HDDs to reach up to 10TB of storage space, but it's quite likely that we won't see such things become a reality for a couple more years.