Vertical hard drive doubles storage capacity

A Japanese company claims to be able to double storage capacity with the world's first commercially available perpendicular magnetic recording hard drive.

Standard hard drives write data to disk in horizontal strips across a rotating platter. But the enhanced technique from Showa Denko KK (SDK) writes vertically onto the disk, allowing for much greater data compression.

"SDK has started commercial production of 1.89in diameter media for use in mobile music players with the capacity of 40GB per disk, double the capacity of conventional products of the same size," said the company in a statement.

"SDK will increase its hard drive media production capacity by 3.05 million disks to 13.75 million disks per month by March 2006, and all new production lines will be able to use the perpendicular magnetic recording technology."

Using the vertical storage technology the company has already started volume production of 0.85in drives for the mobile phone market. SDK expects demand for such drives to grow at 30 per cent in the next year.