Hitachi to ship 4 million perpendicular HDDs this year

“The transition to perpendicular recording technology is essential for continued growth of the hard drive industry, which is why Hitachi invested significant time and resources to achieve a solid product in the Travelstar 5K160,” said Shinjiro Iwata, chief marketing officer, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies.

Perpendicular recording gets its name from the vertical alignment of data bits on the plane of the disk, which takes less room in contrast to the horizontal orientation of today’s longitudinal recording technology. To be accurately recorded and read, the more closely-packed perpendicular bits also require a closer association between the read/write head and the recording media. Hitachi said earlier this year it had achieved the 230Gb/in2 density by manipulating the head and media so that the distance between them is a mere 10nm.