Productivity Breakthrough: Perpendicular Recording and Hybrid Hard Drives
Today Seagate has announced they will release a 160 GB perpendicular recording hybrid hard drive for laptops. This comes hot on the heals of Toshiba who announced yesterday that they have pushed the storage capacities of laptops even higher with their new 200 GB hard drive for laptops. While 160 and 200 GB storage amounts probably don't sound like much in today's mega-storage market where 400 and 500 GB drives are common and 750GB drives are now available, rest assured these are significant developments. Laptop hard drives have been at the forefront of a hard drive revolution.
You have to understand a little about hard drives for that last statement to mean anything. Hard drives are a magnetic storage medium, meaning those 1s and 0s that define the digital age are stored in the form of microscopic magnets. This collection of magnets makes up the bass riff of your favorite MP3 hit right when you pump it through iTunes, your girlfriend's eyes sparkle in those digital pictures and store even more important applications like your bank account passwords. Everything you save turns into a magnetic signature stored on a hard drive.
All the magnets sit on what are known as platters and these platters range in size from 3.5" found in desktops to the 2.5" variety found in laptops and even 1.8" drives now found in some MP3 players. As you can see, the size of the platter determines the form factor of the hard drive, the amount of data you can store on the drive and consequently what type of device it can be put into. That's what makes these recent HD announcements such a huge productivity breakthrough - Toshiba pushed the amount of storage you can stuff onto a 2.5" laptop hard drive up almost 25% overnight. Their hard drive now flaunts a 178 GB per square inch storage density - one of the highest on any drive. Seagate's new drive, while not as large, promises to boot up Windows faster than any drive in history. How is all this craziness happening you might ask?
Both these drives and soon all HDs will use a relatively old technology called perpendicular recording. Normal hard drives of the past placed magnets on their sides, meaning they lined up in these gigantic concentric circles around the hard drive platters. Perpendicular recording stands all those magnets up vertically, allowing for
Seagate's new drive, albeit smaller, may be even more impressive because of its use of hybrid hard drive technology. Taking its name and function from hybrid cars, the hybrid hard drive uses these newer perpendicular recording platters and marries that technology with a flash RAM cache on the hard drive. The technology was first developed in a joint venture between Samsung and Microsoft back in 2005 but this Seagate drive represents the first one to market. What makes this technology so great is that it will effectively eliminate the annoying amount of time it takes your computer to boot up. Windows can be stored on the super fast flash part of the hybrid hard drive, meaning the computer can instantly wake up when you turn it on. These drives also save power because when you aren't doing much with your computer, they can stop spinning those platters and work from the flash cache.
Amazingly, these major developments are already being usurped by even smaller hard drives.
1.8" HD's once found only in fringe technologies and MP3 players are now in ultra-compact laptops. Newer HD form factors of 1" and even .85" HD that can hold 10 GB are now becoming a reality.
What does all this mean to you? Your laptop will boot in seconds instead of minutes. You now have ability to manipulate larger amounts of information more quickly on the go in ways you can't even think of yet. You can now store more information on your laptop than could be kept on a mainframe not even 15 years ago. These developments and miniaturization of these technologies will help usher in a new era of mobile computing and will impact the way you work, pushing the productivity envelop even higher.
