Hotwired: Tiny devices store terabytes and petabytes

The Hitachi Deskstar

Storage. My God but that's a boring topic for a "hey, that's so hot it's cool" review. I know, I know, but really, hear me out.

Data storage has been so dull for so long that even the companies that did it well were bored to tears. IBM used to make the tiniest hard drives on the market but legend has it company execs fell asleep during a presentation from the storage team and they accidentally sold the whole division. No, really.

These days storage is everything. Just ask that teenager you're sitting next to on the bus about storage and they'll start babbling about gigabytes and platters and spin rates.

One thing everyone can agree on is that whatever storage capacity you have it's not going to be enough tomorrow. Fortunately that's not really a problem because hard drive storage doubles every 18 months, which is just as well because, with music downloads becoming legitimate, digital cameras outselling hotcakes and TV and movie producers eyeing the online market, you'll soon have more data than is stored in the Library of Congress on or about your person.

There's only one device that makes storage sexy: Apple's iPod. Now that everyone knows there's a market for "digital audio players" and personal storage, they're all jumping on the bandwagon. In the year ahead expect to see these drives hidden in devices ranging from MP3 players to video cameras.

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Toshiba 0.85 inch drive

Take Toshiba's tiniest hard drive, for example. Today the company makes the smallest hard drive available on the market, a 0.85 inch pocket rocket that stores 2GB of data. That's around 500 songs. But wait, there's going to be more.

Double that, by the middle of the year. Without increasing the drive's size, Toshiba is going to double its capacity to 4GB (1000 songs) in a drive that's no bigger than the end of your thumb and has been awarded a place in the Guinness Book of Records for its trouble.

Next year that will be 6GB, unless something newer and more exciting comes along and blows it away.

Expect to see more music players and cellphones sporting these, as well as digital cameras, which struggle along today with appallingly small amounts of memory. With digital video cameras coming to a discount store near you, you'll want the capacity. A single hour of digital video can run up to 13GB.

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Hitachi Deskstar 7K500

Up at the other end of the island, Hitachi's built the world's largest personal storage device - a whopper, weighing in at 500GB. That's half a terabyte (that's the next silly name up from a gigabyte. Sadly, 1000 terabytes is known as a petabyte, so we won't stop smirking any time soon).

Aimed at the digital video market, this beast is the shape of things to come. It can be built into your PC or laptop or used as an external hard drive. It's about the size of a video cassette or a paperback. It doesn't look like much but the Deskstar can carry every film released by Hollywood this year.

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Perpendicular data storage

Hitachi's about to turn all that on its ear. Perpendicular storage is new game in town and the hard-drive manufacturers are racing to see who can work out how to change the way data is stored. Hitachi is leading the pack and has plans for perpendicular storage devices to be released by the end of the decade.

Today's disks store their data "longitudinally", where each bit of data is aligned horizontally, flat on the surface of the disk.

By standing the bits up, perpendicular to the disk, Hitachi reckons it can jam more data on each disk. How much more? Ten times the amount is considered conservative.

So this tiny drive, Hitachi's Mikey drive, which today offers 4GB of storage in a unit less than 2.5cm long, will by 2010 hold 60GB of data.

That's enough for you to carry around every episode of MASH , or every song you ever heard in a device the size of your cellphone.