The National physical Laboratory have created a new sensor design in the read heads of HDD’s. This new technology could lead to significant increases in HDD capacity by shrinking the amount of data stored from 200 Gigabits per square inch, down to 1TB per square inch. Another benefit is a speed increase, predicted to be up to 10 times faster in read speeds.
Platter-based drives are really on their last rounds of innovation, the future direction in storage is without a doubt Solid State. Currently smaller capacity and higher costs than traditional drives, it’s only a matter of time before the SSD’s are able to rival and surpass the competition in both price and storage levels.
One good option in the interim is a combination of SSD and traditional HDD’s. In a laptop application this would offer low-power use, faster access from the SSD, but also the required storage capacity from the normal HDD – effectively the best of both worlds.
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