Hitachi Unleashing 4-Terabyte Hard Drive Technology

Yeah, that headline speaks for itself. Four terabytes, four times bigger than the largest hard drives on the market right now, and about eight to 20 times larger than the drives most computers come with. At 5MB for the average MP3, that's about 800,000 songs. On one disk. Insane!

Sadly, it's not coming to a Best Buy near you for awhile. The announcement, rumored to drop on us next week, concerns advances in shrinking the size of the read head on a hard drive while reducing the amount of electromagnetic noise the read head has to deal with, which will further allow for denser packing of bits on a spinning disk. The underlying technology on the hard disk is basically unchanged, though the disk of course uses the perpendicular bit packing technology that most current-era drive manufacturers have adopted in recent months.

Now the bad news: Some say it'll be another three to four years before Hitachi's tiny read heads are commercialized. Frankly I'd be surprised if it takes that long: Hard drive technology and its market move at a breakneck pace. I wouldn't be surprised to see someone putting this into play (or something very similar, depending on the patent situation), within 12 to 18 months.

LINK: Hitachi hatches a humongous hard drive