Mobile disk capacity leaps

Breakthrough technology promises memory boom for laptops

Seagate has released its first mobile PC disk drives that use perpendicular recording. The technology breakthrough could allow laptops with terabyte storage capacities by the end of the decade.

While longitudinal recording has data bits flat to the disk surface, perpendicular recording stands bits on end to increase density and storage capacity. Rivals such as Toshiba are also developing the technology.

Seagate’s perpendicular debut for mobile storage devices comes with 2.5in Momentus hard drives at capacities of up to 160GB.

However, with disk capacities growing by a factor of about 1.7 per year, laptops packing up to a terabyte of storage space could be available by 2010. Those fixed-drive capacities would be bolstered by an extra 50GB or so likely to be available via next-generation DVD drives, and about 16GB on Nand Flash devices. Seagate also plans to introduce perpendicular recording across other drive formats.