With SSD Future Uncertain, 5TB HDDs Could Revolutionize the Storage Industry

For the past few days everybody has been talking about the future of storage, with Solid State Drives replacing current magnetic hard drives. But some recent news, which has surfaced thanks to Tom's Hardware, has put this future in a light of uncertainty. It seems that SSDs aren't all everybody expects them to be, as their power requirements are above the current HDDs, which means that they shorten battery life. All in all, some of the storage manufacturers are thinking of ways to improve current HDD technology.

A while back, Western Digital has been rumored to be working on a way to bring a 20K RPM hard drive, as part of its VelociRaptor lineup. Also, Seagate announced recently that a 2TB hard drive would probably hit the stores in 2009. But the most impressive news coming from storage manufacturers is that a 5TB 3.5-inch hard drive will soon be available, especially since Fujitsu has announced that its researchers have developed the technology that will provide 1 TB/inch2 density.

But it seems that Fujitsu isn't the only one that is considering the release of a 5TB hard, Hitachi also has some giant plans of its own. The Japan-based storage specialist stated that it planned to have a commercial 5TB 3.5-inch hard drive on the market by 2010. Apparently the company wants to achieve this with write heads that use something called current perpendicular-to-the-plane giant magnetoresistance or CPP-GMR, for short.

This technology allows a storage manufacturer to push data density above 1TB per square inch, which means that Fujitsu's solution will probably make use of the same technology. To provide a deeper insight in what a 5TB hard drive means, Hitachi's Yoshihiro Shiroishi explained that "By 2010, just two disks will suffice to provide the same storage capacity as the human brain."