Toshiba's next generation of hard disk storage devices can be expanded 10 times

Toshiba America Inc in Beijing on August 18th news, local time Wednesday offering a perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) disk, and the next generation of computer storage devices has finally become a reality. At the same time, Toshiba has become the first company to sell PMR hard disk.

By using the PMR hard disk, the current MP3 player or other device storage capacity can be expanded ten times. This is mainly due to the data in the PMR hard drive using a vertical storage, rather than the current level of commonly used storage. For apple and other portable digital music player on the field, the introduction of Toshiba PMR hard disk is a gospel. Toshiba vice president Scott - Makaba store (Scott Maccabe) said: "if Apple computer using our 1.8 Inch PMR hard disk in the iPod in the future, the company will launch different capacity iPod player."

In recent years, the development of computer storage technology is very fast, in just a few decades, the capacity of the hard disk from a few MB to the development of hundreds of GB. However, with the increase of the density of data storage, the super paramagnetic effect began to appear, the direct consequence is the mutual interference between the data, the final data is destroyed and the hard disk can not continue to use. In order to solve this problem, PMR hard disk also arises at the historic moment. Because each bit data occupy less disk space, vertical way to read and write data to the same disk space to store more data, and the data read / write head arranged closely, when moving farther than the level of reading and writing is very small, so the energy consumption is small, in the case of mobile computing can effectively extend the battery time.

Toshiba is not the only research PMR hard drive storage device manufacturers. In March this year, Toshiba's main rival, Hitachi also launched the PMR hard disk, expected to be released during the year. Hitachi also announced that with the PMR technology, the company will launch the desktop hard disk 1000GB before 2007. Seagate technology is also developing a 2.5 inch PMR hard drive for laptops, which is expected to be available early next year. Fujitsu will release PMR hard disk in 2007.

Toshiba's first PMR hard drive will be mainly for the use of 1.8 Inch hard disk portable electronic devices, including MP3 players, GPS positioning system and Toshiba's own laptop. Toshiba has begun to use PMR hard disk on Gigabeat F41 music player, but this product is only available in japan. Toshiba also plans to launch 0.85 inch PMR hard disk, can be applied on the phone.