Perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) has been praised as the technology to take traditional hard drives into the next phase and as an opportunity to further push the limits of an architecture that is expected to hit a natural border at some point in time. With the first PMR drive generation out the door, Seagate today provided a clearer vision on the capability of the technology. Speaking at the IDEMA DISKCON, chief technology officer Mark Kryder said that it has achieved a record storage density of 421 Gb/inch2. This number is up from 178 Gb/inch2 that is already mass produced by Hitachi today. The previous official record, 230 Gb/inch2, was set by Hitachi in April of 2005
Seagate's currently highest mass-produced storage density is 133 Gb/inch2, but the company believes that this value will increase on a fast pace. 1.8" drives, the form factor used for example by higher-end portable audio players such as Apple's Ipod could soon reach 275 GB. 2.5" notebook drives will grow to 500 GB and desktop drives to 2.5 TB - which is enough to store 41,650 hours of music, 800,000 digital photographs, 4000 hours of digital video or 1,250 video games - at least by today's standards