Toshiba's Breakthrough: A 2.5 Terabyte Hard Drive

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If you were glaring at your terabyte hard drive because you kept butting up against the outer limits of its storage capacity, you’ve got reason to be of intensely good cheer today, folks, because Toshiba only recently announced the development of a 2.5 terabyte hard drive. And it might just go up from there.

What happened was a breakthrough in what’s called “bit-patterned media”. Basically, media is stored in a series of bits on magnetic surfaces, but we were starting to butt up against the outer limits of what that technology could do. Toshiba discovered, meanwhile, that they could organize the bits into patterns of rows, and this organization allows them to increase the amount of storage space.

It’s still in the prototype stages–Toshiba doesn’t expect this technology to become publicly available until 2013–but if it works it’s going to throw a whole new angle into the hard drive / solid state drive wars.