Celebrating the 50^th anniversary of hard disk drives (HDDs), leading creators of HDDs – Seagate Technology and Hitachi Global Storage Technologies – said that in three years from now hard drives will reach unbelievable capacities of 2.0TB – 2.5TB, or will more than triple in three years time.

Hitachi demonstrated it had achieved 345Gb per square inch areal density in laboratory. The company believes that by 2009 platters with such high areal density would result in a 2TB 3.5” desktop drive, a 400GB 2.5” notebook drive or a 200GB 1.8” drive for portable devices.

Meanwhile, Seagate announced the results of a magnetic recording demonstration, setting a world record of 421Gb per square inch. At the demonstrated density level, Seagate expects the capacity ranges to result in solutions ranging in 40GB to 275GB for 1” and 1.8” consumer electronics drives, 500GB for 2.5” notebook drives, and nearly 2.5TB for 3.5” desktop and enterprise class drives. The company believes that it would be able to produce hard drives with platters of 421Gb per square inch density sometime in 2009.

Both Hitachi and Seagate said that the used platters were utilizing perpendicular recording technology, but the latter also emphasized that the demonstration used perpendicular recording heads and media created with currently available production equipment.

Hitachi, who said that the world’s first 1TB (or 1000GB) hard disk drives would emerge later this year, now stated that the company would only launch the appropriate products in the first half of 2007.

Hitachi anticipate that extensions to PMR technology will take hard drive advancements out beyond the next two decades, using ever more complex and sophisticated means such as patterned media and thermally-assisted recording. With these technologies, Hitachi predicts that continued areal density advancements would be possible ten plus years into the future. For example, in approximately 2016, 4Tbits per square inch (Tbits/sq. in.) areal density would enable a 25TB 3.5” drive. Beyond that, Hitachi anticipates as much as 100Tbits/sq. in. areal density will be possible, which would enable a 0.65PB (0.65 petabyte, 650 terabyte or 65 000 gigabyte) 3.5” drive.