14 DAY TRIAL // Most people probably don't care about the technical mumbo jumbo, but when a company says it has something that can double HDD capacity, some attention is warranted.
HGST, formerly Hitachi Global Storage technologies and now a Western Digital sub-company, has revealed a new nanolitography process.
This process is made up of two nanotechnologies: self-assembling molecules and nanoimprinting.
Together, they create large areas of dense patterns of magnetic islands only 10 billionths of a meter (10 nanometers) wide.
That means they are only around 50 atoms wide, roughly 100,000 times thinner than a human hair.
Since HGST published a very long press release about this, it obviously intends to milk it for all it is worth. Thus, it is probable that applying this technology to future drives won't impact prices much. HDDs can't afford to become more expensive at this point after all.