Fujitsu plans higher capacity 2.5-inch drives
- — 31 August, 2006 08:44
Fujitsu will soon bring the benefits of perpendicular recording technology to its family of 2.5-inch hard-disk drives.
The company is planning to launch two new drives worldwide in October, an 80G-byte and 160G-byte model, aimed at consumer laptop computers that also boast a high resistance to shocks, the Tokyo company said Wednesday. The latter is the highest capacity 5,400 rpm yet announced by a drive manufacturer, according to Fujitsu.
Perpendicular recording is a relatively new magnetic recording method that is being increasingly employed on many hard-disk drives.
The method, like the previous longitudinal recording, relies on magnetically charged particles for data storage. However in the new method the north and south poles of the magnetic particles are arranged perpendicular to the disc rather than running parallel to the disc. The result is that each particle occupies a smaller area of the disk's surface and so more particles can be crammed onto it.
At the same time the company will also begin selling versions of the drives aimed at consumer electronics products such as digital video recorders. Key features of these drives are low noise levels and low power consumption.
