Seagate Leads Perpendicular Recording Technology in Storage

Seagate on Thursday unveiled 10 new hard drives including the Momentus 5400.3 160GB, 2.5" drive built on perpendicular recording technology. This is 25 percent more than the largest notebook drive available in the market currently.

Perpendicular technology is being introduced by most of the world’s major hard drive vendors and promises a series of big capacity boosts in the coming years for drives used in servers, PCs, notebooks and portable devices, the vendors say.

It works by standing the magnetic fields that represent data bits upright. In today’s commercially available drives, those fields lay flat on the disk surface. Standing them upright means they take less space, enabling more to be packed on the disk.

In April, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies announced the company was conducting field tests of a 2.5-inch hard drive in its Hitachi Travelstar line of notebook drives using perpendicular recording. The company said at the time it expected to start shipping the drives by the end of the year.

Toshiba and Fujitsu also have plans of their own with perpendicular drives.

Seagate announced the upcoming launch to a variety of other hard drives Thursday.